


Of All Possible Outcomes

by Anonymous



Category: Homestuck
Genre: Alternia is Terrible, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Gaslighting, M/M, POV Eridan Ampora, Pale Romance | Moirallegiance, Yandere, i know it sounds bad and it is but the feelings are actually requited shit's just complicated, this is not an Eridan redemption story
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-02
Updated: 2021-02-01
Packaged: 2021-03-13 08:14:02
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 16
Words: 22,269
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29150277
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/
Summary: The thing is, he's probably being some sort of hero, all things considered.(This work is a reupload-- the previous version got deleted.)
Relationships: Eridan Ampora/Karkat Vantas, eridan ampora and karkat vantas
Kudos: 9
Collections: anonymous





	1. Chapter One

Eridan returns with a string of clothes-hangers on his arm. He lays them out on the dresser and moves to grab at your face. You flinch and his eyes soften. He rubs your neck apologetically (right on your airpipe, you can feel the power, the strength in his fingers, one prick of his claws and-)

“There’s some massivve bazaar-type thing on this planet and I heard it’s excellent for getting some cool shit,” He waggles his ring-clad fingers in front of your and makes a contemplative face. “I think I could use some more exotic stones, dontcha think?”

He continues on, and you realize it was a rhetorical questión. Cool relief settles throughout your chest as you realize with horror that you had been about to reply with something about him  _ having an awful fucking lot, in your eyes _ and that  _ you weren’t sure how many more he could fit on, frankly _ . The last thing you needed was to question the seadweller who was the only reason your blood and organs weren’t being sold as novelty items in some stand outside Clown Church.

“Trade limitations on Alternia wwere fuckin’ shit, evven for me. Had to settle for planet-local gems and gold.”

He grins at you, and despite yourself you blush from the soft, fluttery pale feelings radiating from your chest and leaving you fuzzy-headed and weak-limbed.

“Of course, wwe’ll get some bling for you too. I wwouldn’t havve my rail’ be anything but spoiled.”

He grabs a button-up shirt from the array of clothing on the desk and hands it to you, giving you an expecting look before grabbing it and gently pulling your arms through and beginning to bottom.

You snap out of shock and wave him away with a grumble of indignation, because you do know how buttons work, did he think lowbloods all used zippers or something?

You glance down at yourself and blink, unfamiliar at the sight. You open your mouth and point at the indigo symbol over the breast pocket of the blouse. He laughs and answers the question before it’s asked.

“I figure it’ll explain your temper, as wwell as be high enough to make em’ recognize you as a quadrantmate, not a slavve.”

_ But I am a slave, _ you want to say. You don’t. You figure it’s sweet of him to pretend.

He gestures to Ahab’s Crosshairs, which is appointed next to his respite block doorway for easy access. “Not that anyone would be laying a hand on you either wway, but people are rude, and I’d rather not havve to draww blood. After all, this is supposed to be a relaxing shopping trip for us.”

You put on the rest of the clothes and look at yourself in the mirror. Running the tip of a finger along the unfamiliar blue sign, you hope that these clothes belong to some past fling or quadrant mate you hadn’t heard of. But you know better. The troll who this sign belonged to is dead, their death perhaps only marked by an increase in the FLARP leaderboards for “Orphaner Dualscar”. You hope it was a Vriska sort of troll. The idea of it being someone like Nepeta or Kanaya leaves an unpleasant feeling in your throat.

“Why do you have these lying around, anyway? I mean, I know they’re probably off some loser in one of your FLARP battles, but who goes around keeping the ensigned clothes of some opponent? I mean, what contrived sort of fucking situation did you think you were going to need these for? I guess it’s a good thing you took them, now. But shit, man, as your new moirail, I’m concerned there might be some unhealthy hoarding tendencies I should know about.”

You finish your round of questioning abruptly, cursing your lack of filter. Luckily, Eridan is smiling in a way that makes it clear that he thought what you had said was amusing, not offensive. He playfully paps you on your collarbone, too low to incite any reflexive response. It still makes you blush and swallow back a fuzzy feeling you’ve been having an awful lot lately.

“Kar...I got them for you obvviously. I’ve knowwn about your...condition for swweeps, and I’ve been fin ovver eels pale for you evven longer.” He gestures at you, presumably to take note of your current status of being very much alive and lovingly being held captive by a genocidal seadweller.

You guess it shouldn’t have been as shocking as it was. This was planned. This was planned. A war is raging inside of you, between two pieces of yourself. One is saying this is indicative of something terrifying, that Eridan had put aside his hatred of cullbait in order to be your moirail. That this was planned, premeditated. It can’t help but ask, “What else would he do? How far would he go?” The other voice inside makes the same observations, but notes how romantic it is, really. You should be flattered. You are flattered. It’s not like you deserve this.

You push aside the former; it’s not like you can do anything about this. This is the best option, an inconceivably serendipitous solution to the crime of your existence.

“What...what about Feferi?” you ask, remembering his  _ rages _ after she had broke off their relationship.

“Feferi and I...wwell, wwe don’t fit together, and I wwasn’t meant for her anyway. I mean, she’s going to go get herself culled like evvery heiress before her in a feww swweeps and that’s probably for the best. I havven’t spoke to her in forevver; I have better things to do. Besides, the empire might start questioning my ability if I kept in touch. I see the girl’s ravving fucking mad now--  _ hemoequality _ , what a load of bullshit.”

Suddenly, Eridan walks behind you and wraps his arms around your waist. Startled, you jump, only to be stopped by the hard countours of his body and padded armor. His chin rests upon your head, and you feel almost laughably small in comparison. He lets out a low, soft “shoosh....” into your ear, and a combination of reflexes, Eridan’s somehow expert shoosh-papping skills and shock from the sudden intimacy make your limbs relax into useless strings.

With you now being held up by his embrace, he grabs one of the intricately adorned small knives from one of the scabbard on his belt and slashes it across his open palm. A trickle of violet beads a appears. Before you can react, he’s grabbed one of your hands firmly in his own.

His face intense with concentration, he  _ oh so softly _ touches the tip of the knife to your palm. Blood gushes out instantly, the knife effortlessly slicing open your frail lowblood skin. You wince and your heart races, not from the pain, which is minimal—(That's probably because the knife is so unbelievably sharp, you think. You heard that actually makes it hurt less, somewhere). No, you panic because your blood is out, in the open and you’re trapped in the arms of a highblood, a seadweller and you know he knows, but you’re still scared he might look, might actually see it for the first time and finally realize how disgusting, how cullable you are. Eridan returns the knife to his scabbard.

Carefully, he presses his hand palm-down against your own. His cold breath feathers lightly across your ear. A thrill runs up your spine and you tremble a little. It’s not a bad feeling.

When he lifts his hand again, it’s covered with mixed smears of both of your blood. Eridan lets out a strange, breathy sort of sigh; your face flushes red when you realize it’s a trill. You finally concentrate on the sight of your bloody palms.

If not for Eridan surrounding you and keeping you steady, you think you might have fainted. Not just because of the visible blood, which still freaks you out even though you aren’t a wriggler anymore, and you  _ know  _ getting dizzy seeing blood makes you weak--

On your palms is bright fuschia, with swirls of candy red and dots of violet where the pressing of your palms had not entirely mixed the blood.

Eridan’s voice whispers in your ear, still trembly from trilling and full of adoration.

“Kar, wwhen I was a little wwriggler, I had these....these horrorterrors, I guess. But they wweren’t like any horrorterrors I’ve evver heard of, because they weren’t horrible at all. I was...I was surrounded by red, bright red like you, and I was holding someone small and burning hot in my arms. I was bigger, evven bigger than I am now, an adult, and so, so happy. It was a vvision, Kar, I swwear. It wwas fate, destiny, just like me finding the gun and the ship. And wwhen I saw Fef, wwell...she wwas pink and higher than anyone else, how could she be wwrong? And I figured she wwas my fated, because imperial red is that color, and fuschia girls don’t just wwash up on your shore out-of-nowwhere, ynoww. But I was wwrong, evven then it felt wwrong. And then, and then I met you...wwe wwere only 5 swweeps, remember? And for some reason, some vvoice in my head, the strings of fate pulling me towards you, I pestered you, evven though you were anonymous grey and talked like a lowwblood and for I kneww wwas one. By the time wwe wwere 6, I wwas ready to abandon my fate, and be wwith you instead. I adored you, and I hadn’t evven felt you yet. Wwanted to keep you with me, I evven started preparing corners of my ship, finding soft things for piles and getting evvery rom-com I could on blue-slay...”

He trails off for a moment, his passionate raving giving way to profound and sentimental wonder.

Your name is Karkat Vantas, and you figure this is probably the best possible outcome for you.


	2. Chapter Two

When you step out of the ship onto the planet, you recoil in surprise and attempt to dart back into the entrance. Eridan, who’s been doing his best expression of a leech on your arm ever since the intimate moment you’d shared earlier, holds you still with one hand and smacks his face with the other. 

“Shit, I’m sorry Kar, I forgot to tell you; this planet’s got a thick atmosphere. It blocks most of scorching heat and rays, so it’s safe to wwalk around during daytime, evven for  _ delicate _ trolls like you.”

You decide not to make a joking retort about being called delicate, since you like a lot better than if he just called you a shitblood like you are.

Instead, you cautiously peer out from under Eridan’s cape, which you realize, with more than a bit of embarrassment, you’d ducked under for cover. God, what are you, a pale pornstar? Luckily, the landing yard stretching outwards at the bottom of the stairs seems to be private, with a tall wall and gate separating Eridan and you from whatever lays beyond.

You glance at the exposed skin of Eridan’s face and hands, and sure enough, he seems to be in no discomfort. You tentatively stretch your hand into the open air and are relieved and surprised to find that it’s only pleasantly warm.

Eridan has to stop you from throwing your head back and attempting to take in the sun that was somehow failing to burn you to a crisp.

“Kar!” He hisses, alarmed, covering your eyes. “You still shouldn’t  _ look directly at it _ .”

You look down again and laugh, too enchanted by the concept of a sun that doesn’t burn to feel as ashamed as you usually would.

“Sorry. Damn, an atmosphere that makes the weather like  _ this?  _ This place is deluxe.”

Eridan, now assured that you weren’t about to fry your retinas, adjusts your shades. They hide your eyes, which have developed just a sliver of candy red around the edges. You’re so small; you haven’t grown in sweeps. You think it’s the shitty sopor.

Actually, even if the sun doesn’t burn, it’s kind of weird that it’s out....

“Hey, why are we shopping the middle of the day anyway? It’s weird stepping out of the ship to find it’s full fucking noon. It felt like sunset.”

Eridan shrugs and locks the door to the ship before responding. “The locals on this planet wwere diurnal, and so are most of the species in this section of the galaxy. Evven though they’re conquered by us, it just kind of stuck, I suppose. I mean, since it’s such a vvital planet, the bazaar is open 24/7, but the good stuffs always there in the daytime. All the landdwwelin’ trolls are probably recovvering from jetlag in their ships, since they aren’t adjusted like ours. That, or they’re too tired to properly haggle and get fucked over. And for peasants, I suppose losing 50 caegars to poor haggling actually  _ matters”. _

You don’t comment. 50 caegars was more than your sweeply allowance back on Alternia.

He turns back towards you and grins, excited and youthful, and you are hit by a rush of sudden and nebulous feeling-maybe it’s deja vou? The emotional whiplash leaves you reeling, between this excitable, gossipy,  _ boyish _ Eridan you have known and had more fun than you would admit with- and the cruel, domineering seadweller who you were always aware of, just beneath your skin. The Eridan who filled you with fear and wonder, who seemed so  _ high _ and far-away from disgusting mutant you. Both have made you pinch yourself and take freezing showers in order to rid yourself of the pale feelings that curled up and nestled in your veins. Now, you figure that you shouldn’t have bothered.

You and Eridan walk down the steps and to the wall. You noticed the perfectly manicured grass had withered up and died where the ship touched the ground.

Eridan approaches the large gate leading out of the landing yard and taps the handle. A pleasant, high voice radiates out from where there must be hidden speakers.

“Scanning for violet or fuschia bloods. Please stand still.” After a moment, the voice speaks again. “One seadweller detected-sign reads Eridan Ampora. Greetings, your majesty. Another troll detected in the foreground. Would you like me to scan?”

Eridan jumps a little, apparently not as used to this planet’s technology as he’d have you believe.

“No, uh. No. Don’t scan. He’s wwith me,” He responds, trying to smoothen out his voice.

The gate swings open, and Eridan gently grabs your hand as you walk through.

Sound hits you almost instantly; the wall must have functioned as some sort of muffler- as you step out into a bustling market.

You crane your head to try to take in the sheer amount of things happening all around you. Buildings, some clearly ancient and embedded into the ground and surroundings so firmly you would have thought them natural. Others, stretching so far into the sky that you couldn’t make out the top, even in the clear, bright atmosphere of the planet.

Eridan seems a little more composed, although you can see him resisting the urge to gape at the surroundings with you. He swallows, and lets out a breathy wolf whistle.

“I’vve seen the place on holos and broadcasts before, but damn. There really  _ is _ nothing like being there yourself,” He indulges in another moment of restrained awe.

An adult teal blood strolls by with a small mammalian creature on her shoulder and a quiet, veiled slave on her heels. She snorts at your expression and snaps her claws loudly next to your ear.

“Newbies, huh? They just let wrigglers run around the empire as soon as they ascend now, I guess. Go back to whatever military camp you just deserted from and quit gaping. You’re blocking the street.”

She opens her mouth as if to say more, but is interrupted by a low growl from beside you. Her gaze swivels to rest on Eridan, who has one hand already on his gun.

The teal blood takes one sight of Eridan’s gills and mouthes something that looks like, according to personal experience “oh  _ shit _ !”. Her gaze shifts up to the nearby gated landing yard with horror and comprehension. She quickly drags her slave down a nearby alley for an escape.

Eridan looks like he might go after her, but a hand on his arm and a disgusted look down the dark, damp alleyway convinces him to let it go.

He slides your hand down his arm to meet his, and beams at you. You can’t believe calming him down is this easy; you wonder how the hell Feferi had found it so exhausting.

You and him spend the next few hours exploring the bazaar. There is an unspoken agreement to not stray too far from the landing yard; after all, it was easy to get lost in the winding streets, especially when you had no previous experience.

Still, you two marvel at the wonders around you. You see only a few trolls; most of the vendors and shoppers are a dizzying array of aliens, presumably higher-ranked species within the vast empire. You and Eridan make a game of trying to name them; he wins every time, due to him being “a fucking nerd”, you claim. It’s not your fault you didn’t get the extensive hivefeeds and ancient texts he did; he was fully expected to be a general, you weren’t even  _ on spectrum _ .

Eridan holds true to his promise to “get some bling”. He won’t stop dragging you over to booths to place expensive circlets on your horns and rings on your fingers. You wave him off most of the time, noting that your horns are “too fucking nubby” for jewelry anyway. He manages to get a bracelet and a violet studded horn circlet on you anyway.

Eventually, the planet’s sun begins to set. You two are walking around, eating fried sugar-dough off sticks, when you fail to suppress a yawn.

Eridan looks down at you with a grin and rubbed the base of your horn playfully. You stumble from the unexpected sensation and he catches you, lifting you up so that you’re lying in his arms.

You flush pink and weakly pound the fist not holding the fried dough against his solid chest. He laughs, and presses your face against his chest, presumably to hide your red flush from any brave onlookers.

“Tired, Kar?” Cheeky asshole.

“I’m pretty sure this counts as indecent. Not everyone wants to see your pale PDA.”

You pause as you realize that A. You’re helpless in a seadweller’s arms and B. You had been so comfortable, you hadn’t even noticed. Screw past, present, and most likely future you, the palesluts.


	3. Chapter Three

When your blush dies down, you peek out from Eridan's arms. 

You're confused to see he's headed off in an entirely new direction. Nervously, you tap him on the chest

"Um, Eridan? Are we going to go back to the ship soon? No offense, but I'm kind of..." You trail off, feeling embarrassed for your low stamina, especially since Eridan doesn't seem phased. His clothes and hair are still as impeccable as always, and with his long legs and highblood endurance, the day's activities probably seemed like a casual stroll. 

But he doesn't seem annoyed. In fact, it seems like he's enjoying carrying you around. You still feel kind of weird about it though. 

He frowns softly and pets your head, playing with where it curls over your forehead.

"Oh, you poor thing. I just havve one thing left to do and wwe'll get back to the ship, okay?"

Wow. Okay. That was  _ really _ pale. You stay quiet and try not to react, because as much as you found that kind of hot (you're past the point of lying to yourself about being submissive with quadrants. In theory, at least; you hadn't formally had any before Eridan had taken you), you're also in the middle of a busy street, Eridan really has no shame, does he? You couldn't buy that confidence. It comes included with gills, you figure. 

Eridan suddenly turns right and comes to rest at the doorstep of a medium-sized building. It's in a nicer area of the bazaar (although you doubt Eridan has taken you to any  _ bad  _ parts), you observe, and you even see a troll or two milling about in the distance.

The shop itself has a large front window displaying extravagant jewelry. You know you could live a hundred lives as a rustblood and still see fewer caegars pass through your hands than what it would take to buy anything here. 

Eridan places you down on your unsteady feet, holding your shoulders firmly until he's sure you're not going to topple over. You pat his arm and roll your eyes a little, demonstrating that you are perfectly capable of returning to a bipedal lifestyle after a half-hour of being carried.

He laughs and raps sharply on the door. You startle a bit, knowing that if you had been so brash on Alternia, you would have gotten yourself culled.

A cerulean eye peeks out from a slit in the door. Upon seeing Eridan, the eye widens and the door swings open. 

The shopkeeper, apparently a cerulean-colored alien of a small stature and with thin, needly fingers like brambles hastily bows to Eridan. He makes a hand gesture you interpret to be an invitation for him to come inside. 

Upon seeing you, his eyes narrow in suspicion. He begins to figure a holster at his hip. You shrink into Eridan's shadow, instinctively trying to make yourself even smaller than you already are. Eridan puts an arm over your shoulder protectively. 

"It's for him." He nods sternly at the shopkeeper, who rushes to allow you both through the door.

It would seem absurd, this newly ascended troll commanding such authority from this fully-grown adult, but you don't laugh. Something about Eridan now lends credibility to his commands; a sort of aura that in this moment, makes him seem more like an imperial army commander than some nine-sweep-old shopping for absurdly priced jewelry. 

For the first time, him flarping under "Orphaner Dualscar" seems to you more like a rightful succession than a boy messing around in his ancestor's clothes. 

The shopkeeper is probably middle-aged, which of course, you figure, by cerulean standards, means he has seen hundreds of sweeps come and go. But scarred fingers and a hunched back, no doubt from working on the fine details upper highbloods demand for metalwork, lend him the appearance of someone far older.

The shop itself is small but extravagantly decorated. There's jewelry in glass cases, golden trim on the walls and sugared grubs lying in a glass bowl near a shiny-looking backless couch. 

You hover near the door, unsure, and the shopkeeper sends you an odd look. Eridan communicates something to you with his eyebrows that appears to be concern, before glancing at the couch and back at you. Realization alights in his eyes and he puts a hand on your shoulder, leaning down to whisper in your ear.

"You can sit on the couch, Kar, y'noww. It's for customers." He ushers you over and waits until you've hesitantly taken a seat, sure not to let your hands rest on the fabric. You think, a bit hysterically,  _ that it probably cost more than your grubtop back home. Which probably isn't very impressive, since it was a pretty shitty grubtop, but still.  _

"It's silk." Eridan explains. It takes you a moment to realize he's talking about the couch. "Made by the jade bloods back on Alternia. Expensivve, but not for me. I'm royal as shit." You surprise yourself with a choked out laugh, because it's so  _ Eridan _ . 

The shopkeeper frantically pretends to be absorbed in the workings of a lock on a door behind the counter. It's a pretty transparent attempt at pretending he hadn't been watching you two. Eridan raises his eyebrow, unconvinced, and taps his foot on the ground impatiently. He's wearing boots, you notice. They're black, and the light reflected off all the gems in the rooms makes them glitter. There's a small heel, you're not sure what for. It's not as if he needs to be any  _ taller. _

"Well, it's somewwhere back here, your majesty." The shopkeeper explains nervously, finally swinging open the backdoor and rummaging around in the room beyond. 

Without thinking about it, you raise your hand placatingly, even though you know he can't see you. 

"It's okay. We can wait." You assure the alien. Eridan tenses and you hear a muffled yelp and a small crash from the back room. You must have startled the shopkeeper. You retract your hand and wince.  _ Why are you like this? _

Eridan takes a quick glance to see that the shopkeeper can't see him and sends you a frantic, flustered look, his fins drooping. You're fairly sure it's taking all of his willpower to suppress a whine. He attempts to glare at you, but it comes out more like a pout. 

_ Holy shit _ , he's jealous. You consider than maybe the shopkeeper's shaking and fumbling might have been more than fear. Considering the way he was looking at you two...ew, gross, was he  _ getting off _ to this? You don't even  _ know _ him. 

You're about to throw yourself metaphorically and maybe literally at Eridan's feet and apologize for being such a paleslut that you didn't even  _ consider _ , when he walks over and leans to whisper in your ear. 

"Stop talking to it like that. I can't handle you  _ teasing _ me Kar." His voice is husky and un-composed, and you realize that's he's not exactly  _ angry.  _ You flush red, and Eridan grins, patting your head. 

"Later. On the ship." It's not a suggestion.

"I wasn't trying to-" you try to defend yourself, but Eridan trembles a little and puts a ring-clad finger to your lips. 

"I knoww." He pulls his finger back as the shopkeeper re-enters. You lick your lips, and they taste like sea-salt and flowery perfume. 


	4. Chapter Four

The shopkeeper hurries over as quickly as he can without jostling the small box in his hands. 

He hovers uncertainly before holding it out before Eridan. His head is bowed. 

Eridan takes it carefully, a stark contrast to his usual flippancy. His touch is feather-light, holding it on the tips of his fingers. 

There's a reverence there. Your bloodpusher is banging against your ribs like a jailed troll. 

You think this is how he would shoot his gun; with gentle hands and a respect for the power it held. He had talked with you about his gun sometimes, over Trollian. You didn't understand much of it, but you didn't complain. There was something intimate about the way he divulged his knowledge to you. In hindsight, you could call it pale. 

He tilts it towards his face and opens the lid. Apparently satisfied, he smiles and closes it again. 

He then places the box on the couch, a few inches from you. You think offhandedly that patrons for this place would probably call it a  _ sofa _ , the type of word you'd only seen in trashy half-caegar books about brooding blue-bloods in clandestine spades. Or  _ playing _ with lowblood slaves under their dominion. You had shoved the latter particular far under your recoopercoon, knowing Crabdad would throw a fit if he found them. More of a fit than usual, anyway. You try to stop thinking about Crabdad. You don't want to cry, not in front of a highblood and not in this fancy shop. 

You startle as you feel a pressure on your shoulder. You tense, expecting an attacker, but instead Eridan's worried eyes swim in your vision. You blink. 

He's now knelt on the floor, with one knee propped up and the other flat against the ground, like an honorable threshecutioner kneeling before The Empress in a war drama. You think he'd usually complain about his clothes getting dirty, but you can see that the floor seems as pristine and glittering as everything else in this place. 

He grins. 

"You done spacin' out, Kar? I wwas wworried for a moment there." 

You're not really sure you want to know what's in that box. 

The seadweller nods towards the box, and you realize that he means for you to open it. 

Mutant blood pounding in your eyes, you reach for the box. Your hands feel sweaty.

Inside there is a ring. You feel a rush of relief, and immediately chastise yourself for it. What else could it have been? You're in a fucking jeweler's shop. 

It's surprisingly simple, considering who bought it. A golden band with three gems, two small violet ones bordering a larger one of cherry red. In the red gem, there is, in violet, Eridans sign. Your head spins trying to figure out  _ how _ in the empire the jeweler managed that. 

Curving along the red gem are two thin bands of gold, grasping it like shackles. It's your sign. 

Scared to breathe, you gingerly pick up the ring.  _ This little thing is probably worth more than dozen husktops, those nice ones blue-bloods use for gaming.  _ You move to slip it on your finger, but Eridan grips your wrist and tuts. 

"Can't they go on any finger?" You rack your thinkpan for the last time you wore a ring, and the only situation that surfaces is a fuzzy memory of your third wiggling day. Crabdad had gotten you one of those grub-rings; a few fatty insects speared on a ring of neon-green plastic. You remember sticking it on your pinky and pretending it was one of the 'candy' ones you'd seen subjuggulators lick on your shitty telegrub. You spoke with a slur and pretended to collapse on the couch, consumed by giggles. Crabdad had then become furious with you, for reasons you didn't then understand. He took the ring, with two insects still on it, and you never had one again. 

The jeweler is trying to hide their wince, like you've just stepped on a particularly expensive rug with muddy shoes. Your skin itches and your windsacs feel as if they are being closed in on by an unrelenting force. You glance at Eridans hand, which is still wrapped around your wrist. All of his fingers have rings. 

Eridan ignored him, smiling adoringly like your ineptitude was what made the moon rise and set. 

"Yeah, but you're supposed to put it on this one here." Eridan taps the finger next to your pinky on your right hand. "Quadrant rings, at least. The most important rings go there. Also, most rings are made to fit that finger by default."

Rings were made to fit different fingers? You had never even thought of that. You guess it explains why Eridan never seemed to have the trouble of his slipping off. 

You slip the ring on the 'ring' finger. The ring is small- small enough to fit you comfortably. It glitters in the light of the shop. In the corner of your eye, the ruby sparkle seems to blur and drip from your sign like blood. 

A blink and the effect is gone. 


	5. Chapter Five

You glance at Eridan. He appears to have forgotten to breathe and violet is dusted across his cheeks. His eyes glitter.

Snapping out of his reverie, he grabs your arm and directs you over to a full-length mirror. 

It's at least 9 feet tall, and it makes even Eridan seem small. You think of the centuries-old highbloods it must be crafted for. You're startled by how young Eridan and you appear in the reflection, like you had pupated the day before. 

The ring seems to catch all the light in the room. For such a small item, it's noticeable. You guess that was probably the point. 

After all, the point is that you're now wearing his symbol. It's a nicer, more pity-filled version of a master's brand.

Sure, highbloods often wore quadrant rings (at least, you had gathered so much from the celebrity spotlights and quirky articles in Growlsopolitan), but generally  _ both _ trolls wore them. And putting your  _ sign _ on it instead of just a stone representing your color...a normal troll's quadrants must have a bulge of steel to do something that blatantly possessive. 

Eridan softly kisses the top of your head and turns sharply on his heel, away from the mirror. He claps twice (which, you admit, is fucking  _ adorable _ , he could be a leerleader) and gently shoves you in the direction of door near the entrance of the shop. 

"You'vve got sugar all ovver your face from earlier. I mean, you're as adorable as alwways-" He winks at you and you hear the shopkeeper drop something with a small crash. You instinctively turn to help them, but Eridan places his hand on your neck( _ you flinch bad bad no he's going to hurt you _ ) to stop you and then gives you a light shove in the direction of the door. 

"Go clean yourself up in the bathroom, okay honey?" He laughs a little and you feel the dark cloud accompanying his hand on your neck dissolve like sugar in water. The sensation isn't physical, but it still sends a shiver dancing along your form.

Maybe he hadn't touched you at all, and you're just crazy, you think. It would hardly be surprising if you found a new way you were a fucked-up piece of shit. 

You head in the direction of the room Eridan had pointed out for you. The 'bathroom' he had called it. You had heard the word  _ bath _ before, you think. In a edu-cast, one of the rare ones that had reached your sparsely-populated lowblood hive cluster.

When you were little, you had lamented living in the Alternian plains. After seeing your first culling when you were 3 and half, on the telegrub, you realized the necessity of living in the middle-of-nowhere, for you.)

In the edu-cast, they had told you of a geological formation found on many planets within Her Imperial Condescension's empire, may she live forever. They had shown deep pools of white water along jagged, dark rocks. Steam curled up from these pits, obscuring the surrounding landscape. 

Did this planet have those? Had the jeweler's shop...been built around one of those boiling pits? You found the idea both terrifying and hard to believe, considering the cool air of the shop, but what did you fucking know? How were you supposed to clean sugar off your face with one of those? You imagined the water touching your skin, burning and scarring over your cheeks: the boiling water coming to meet the hot, traitorous liquid in your veins. 

You opened the door and found yourself standing in an immaculately polished room. White stone comprised both the floor and walls, and a lighting-apparatus surrounded by clear crystals sent bits of light bending along the walls. A loadgaper and a sink, as well as a table of unfamiliar powders and bottles occupy the space. 

It's an ablution block. One both larger and more ornate than you had ever seen, but an ablution block all the same. You, for what feels like the hundredth time this day, feel like the world is particularly invested in you making a fool of yourself. 

You grab a towel and scrub your face until it's in danger of going pink, and swish some water around your mouth for good measure. The water tastes and looks different from the cloudy brown stuff that had come out of the faucet back at your hive. 

You don't hear the shot. You'd learn later that it was practically noiseless. You do hear the panicked undercurrent of conversation and then the silence. You hear the thud of the shopkeeper hitting the floor. You are confused for the first moment. And then, worse than that, you aren't. You hear the click of Eridan's boots against the stone floor. You hear a knock on the door. You hear Eridan's voice, and simultaneous relief and disgust and fear bubble up inside you like a pot boiling over. You lean over the sink and muffle a dry gag in the discarded towel. 

"You done, Karkat?" 

You swallow and reply. "Yeah." A moment passes. "Sorry."

Eridan swings open the door and guides you towards the exit, careful to angle you away from the interior of the shop. Smoke still is curling up from the barrel of the Crosshairs, and the smell that fills the room is like a sick caricature of your former hive's tiny meal block on 12th Perigree's Eve.

When you two have stepped out into the darkening market, the sea-dweller sends you a confused, concerned look. 

"What for?" You don't respond. The words to describe the guilt in your gut are evading you like a slow meowbeast's prey.

Eridan makes a funny sort of face, with a quivering mouth that seems to be battling between frowning and smiling. The alien planet's sunset layers crimson over the violet blush of his cheekbones and gills, painting him gray and pink.

You don't protest when he lifts you into his arms and returns the way you had come. You hand, branded by the ring with his sign, rests on his bloodpusher, and you spend the rest of the return to the ship feeling it under your fingertips. 


	6. Chapter Six

You don’t remember falling asleep, but you must have nodded off to the sway of Eridan’s arms and the steady beat of his bloodpusher, because the next thing you feel is being plopped into something soft and sinking in.

You flex your fingers and toes and sleepily burrow into the warmth. A cool hand and the texture of rings on your arms shocks you into reality, and your eyes fly open as you struggle to assume a defensive stance. Your feet slip in the avalanche of pillows and scarves and you fall sideways back into the pile with a soft thwap.

As you frantically attempt to regain your footing (your exhaustion and fear making it a nigh-hopeless task), your eyes focus on the source of the touch.

Eridan is standing above you, his hands gestured outwards placatingly. His cheeks are dusted and his lips are twitching slightly in the way you’re coming to realize means he’s trying to look suitably embarrassed while trying not to laugh.

Your shoulders drop and a relief tingles throughout your body. This lasts for only a moment before, now fully awake, you realize where you are sitting. A pile. You can feel your face burning red, and you’re caught between the urge to bury it in the pile and to not appear obscene by doing so.

You knew Eridan was pale for you, and that still feels weird to think, but you’d hadn’t thought of, no- had been desperately trying to not think of this.

Eridan was now leaning forwards and playing with the stitches of a pillow, looking very much as though he intended on sitting. On the pile. With you. You can’t help letting out a little squeak.

Eridan’s eyes resume their attention on you quicker than a bullet. You’re struck more than ever by the intensity of his gaze. You feel paralyzed in your spot, like a mouse who has just looked into the hungry eyes of the meowbeast.

He steps back hastily and swallows.

“I thought...wwe wwould-” He murmers.

You sway a little despite yourself. You still maintain a defensive stance. This doesn’t seem lost on Eridan; his ear-fins twitch slightly forward in agitated bursts of movement. It reminds you painfully of how Crabdad made tiny, restless snips with his claws when frustrated. The memory washes a bit of your fear away, with a dull, throbbing sadness left in its place.

“Oh. Right.” Eridan looks disappointed for a moment, before seeming to come upon a realization that makes his ear-fins perk up. “Right! Kar, you must be exhausted...followw me!”

He holds out his hand, and you take it gingerly. His hands are so much larger than yours, and so much cooler. You’re hyper-aware of every spot where your skin touches, in between rings and air.

He pulls you up gently, his other hand holding your shoulder heavy. Not letting go of your hand, he wraps his other arm around your shoulders.

The two of you walk through the halls of the ship, Eridan shepherding you along in a tight embrace that toes the line between lover and turnkey.

The ship is different from what you would have expected from Eridan, to say the least. You’re far from an expert on ships, considering that up until a few nights ago, you had thought you would be culled before you ever set foot on one. But you had seen pictures of the massive imperial ships of war, and the accompanying, smaller helms owned by individual highblood officers. You have seen pictures of Eridan’s hive, an ancient water-ship that had once carried his ancestor.

Although from differing times in Alternia’s history, what those ships had in common was that they were machines of war. Massive industrial growths of metal and flesh, and, from what you had seen in military-set-shows, cold and clinical inside, with sharp lines and utilitarian features.

You would have thought Eridan, with his, as you describe it, “massive military hard-on”, would have the most obnoxiously austere vessel he could get his webby hands on.

But as the two of you walk through the ship, you are constantly set aback by the softness of it. The walls are a light violet, and although the hallway floors are hard, the main room you had been in earlier was covered in plush carpets that you couldn’t help but sink your hands into. The lightning is soft, the type that makes you feel safe and a bit sleepy. There are posters for movies you love hanging aroundyou, and although you and Eridan are walking too quickly for you to make sure, you're almost positive those marks in the corners are director’s signatures. The thought is exciting enough that if it weren't for Eridan’s iron grip, you’re sure you would have spent hours fanboy-ing over them.

You crane your neck in an attempt to see over Eridan’s arms and dumb cape and nearly trip in the process. He slows and acknowledges the surroundings for the first time.

“You can stop to look at them. If you wwant.” He gestures sheepishly and reluctantly releases his hold on you.

You leap forward to examine the one closest to you, a poster for “In Which a Rust-Blooded Prostitute Delivers Services to A Visiting Indigo-Blood, Who In Turn Develops Red Feelings For Her, Creating a Situation Which Emphasizes Caste-Differences and the Difficulties Caste Disparity Can Present in a Relationship”.

You run your fingers over the glass case, examining the tiny signature until your puffs of breath make it too foggy to see. To your great embarrassment, an excited little trill escapes you.

Eridan makes a sound halfway between a squeak and a gasp, and when you look over, he looks surprised and thrilled. His foot is paused midair, his surprise and elation shocking enough to pause the habitual movement.

You want to melt into the wall, escape through an airlock, and never be seen again as you suffocate in the cold vacuum of space. Honestly, how many embarrassing and borderline-explicit things can you in one night?

‘Tis a question long debated by renowned killosophers, you think. No need, for you have found the answer! Infinity. An infinite amount of embarrassment can be amassed by one Karkat Vantas.

Eridan’s on you before you can process what’s happening. An arm slung around your waist in something half-resembling a hug. A momentary feeling like of being popped like a balloon, before Eridan seems to reluctantly resist his urge to squeeze. A hand rubs your side apologetically, and you instinctively twitch inward, knowing claws are so so close to your vulnerable stomach. You’re being half-carried away at twice your original speed, and Eridan is opening a door before you can think to say anything.

The room is large by your standards, but you adjusted for your rapidly changing frame-of-reference, you guess you’d downgrade it to medium. The walls are made of white stone, and the floor is a mosaic of different colored stones in geometric patterns and bits of the same white stone offset against each other.

You had seen this sort of room before, in movies. You look around the room, and yup. An empty pool, with mirrors on the other wall. A rack of fluffy violet and gold towels and bottles of stuff you’d probably have to run at least blue to recognize.

You try to bolt, but Eridan’s arm stays firm around your waist. Your hands shake and your vision is tunneling in on the empty tub.

You swallow. Your mouth is dry.

“You said that we were going to sleep.” You whisper, barely managing to choke out the words.

Eridan gives you a soft grin, and you know from the gentleness in his eyes that it’s not intentional but you can see his fangs peeking out of his mouth like a threat and. And-

His hand is cold on the small of your back. It’s grounding in the warm, damp room but your mind strays to his impeccably trimmed claws, razor-sharp.

“Wwell, you’re going to take a bath first.” He looks you up and down and affectionately pinches at your shirt. “You’re covered in sugar, and I doubt you’vve taken a bath or shower in the last wweek.”

“Ascension was only a night ago.” You frown. It seems both so long ago and an immediate threat. The night and day had been long, but a deep-seated sense of fear and resignation still courses through you, the fact that you are spared from culling still not fully registered with your brain.

He cocks his head and ruffles your hair. Indulgent. A little condescending, you guess, but you can’t bring yourself to be mad about it. That’s probably for the best, anyway. On a sliding scale of highblood-lowblood (mutant mutant mutant) interactions, condescending is pretty lucky.

“Based upon your insistence that you livved” the next words are marked by air quotations “in the middle of fucking nowwhere, like at the median of nowwhereness” Eridan lets his hands down, brushing one along your cheek on the way, the way he keeps touching you. “I figured it took you a few nights to get to ascension point.”

It was true. You couldn’t take the empire-issued shuttlebugs because they tested blood color. Instead, you paid what few savings you had managed to a olive-blood neighbor for them to let you tag along on their trip to the nearest city. They hadn’t questioned you getting off when the trees started to blot out the plain.

You’re traveling the rest of the way with a quadrant-mate, you had said.

That had been one of the most terrifying days of your short, miserable life. Shielded from sunlight in the corpse of a ancient tree, waiting for Crabdad, hyper-aware of the fact that he might not find you, that he didn’t survive the trip by himself.

You didn’t deserve Crabdad, you thought. He had found you, and you had traveled the rest of the way through trees on his back (you were too heavy for that now, you knew, but neither you nor your lusus could manage to care much), sobbing quietly the entire time.

A few miles from the nearest ascension point, you had hugged Crabdad for the last time and left to your likely-death with the vague hope of stowing away unrecorded towards some backwater galaxy where a willing worker’s more traitorous qualities could be overlooked.

You had been caught instantly, a drone detaining you under the request of an ascending violet-blood for “all blood-related mutants at this point to be held for further review”.

His sign had appeared at your cell door like a vision. You had looked up, and there he was, the light from the hallway spilling around him into the dark cell, falling over his high cheekbones and reflecting blindingly off his jewelery.

A sort of personal guardian angel, coming to whisk you away from the dark metal hallways of the holding wing to the bright white stone of this room, gleaming, with looming pillars barring you from the void of space outside.

You keep your eyes trained on the floor as Eridan rummages through the shelves. You count the steps towards the closed door with your eyes, knowing it’s a futile task. Eridan could outrun you on your best day, and there’s only so many places to hide on an unfamiliar ship floating in space.

Eridan seems to have found the last of what he was looking for with a satisfied “ah!”. He strides over to you, stopping to casually unhook his cape and hang it on a hook on the wall.

He glances down at your feet, seemingly a little suprised.

“You’re going to havve to take your shoes off, Kar.” He jibes playfully.

You flush and hurriedly bend over, fingers fumbling over each other as you tug off your boots like a dumbass.

When you’re done (and Eridan is done snickering), he grabs your hand and gently pulls you in the direction of, well- you wouldn’t call it a tub, considering you’re pretty sure it’s bigger than your entire ablution block back home. But yeah. That thing. You’re walking towards it.

Eridan’s sat down on the ledge, his feet swaying in the churning water. There’s bubbles, you think dazedly. Foam churns on the surface, white as a lusus belly. It looks like the ocean, you think. Or pictures you had seen of it, anyhow.

Eridan’s breathing has slowed noticeably. He has little gills on his ankles, you realize. They’re submerged, breathing in the water in little pulses of movement.

Oh fuck. Fuck you with a rusty culling fork, you forgot.

You do the entirely reasonable and pragmatic thing and bolt.

  
  



	7. Chapter Seven

You make it about three feet. Eridan is out of the water in an instant, lifting you into the air. You instinctively kick for a moment before slumping down in defeat.

A few moments of heavy breathing on your part and Eridan gingerly sets you back down.

“Care to explain wwhatevver the fuck that wwas?” He asks.

Your fingers grip your sides over your shirt, hard enough to sting a little.

Eridan crouches down a little, trying to get a read on your face, but you stare stubbornly at the floor at an almost impressive angle. Doesn’t he know floors are basically the gossip section of Clawsmopolitan in terms of sheer entertainment?

“Kar?” He sounds so genuinely unsure and concerned that you can’t help it. You slowly look up, meeting his eyes despite screaming instincts to the contrary.

His pupils are blown wide inside a thin ring of violet and his eyebrows are pinched together in a scrunched-up way that you’d almost hazard to call adorable. Pitiable, definitely.

“I’m more fucked up than you think.” You manage around the lump in your throat.

Eridan looks affronted. “Kar, no offense, but you are the least threatening troll I’vve evver met.”

You facepalm. “No, no not like that-just. Let me just show you, ok? Fuck, let’s get this over with.”

You lift up your shirt in a quick, harsh movement. Rip off the bandaid, possibly lose the pity of the troll keeping you from getting culled. No big deal. You can do this.

You can’t do this.

Eridan’s eyes flick down and he looks more confused than anything. He’s holding back a giggle, you can tell.

“Kar, those are grubscars. They’re totally normal. Like a third of landwwellers have em’-“

“No!” You interrupt, frustrated. “Look closer.” To help this dumbass, you use your claws to stretch on the skin above them, exposing them more fully to the air. You wince.

Eridan squints, before slackening in shock.

He seems lost in his thinkpan for a second before your hands are slapped away, quick as lightning. Ow. You examine your smarting hands, noticing a pinkish bruise starting to form.

Eridan notices and winces. “Sorry Kar, I should havve been more careful. I’ll get some salvve later. But seriously-“ he returns his attention to your stomach. “Don’t evver fucking do that! I don’t knoww howw much you knoww about your gills, but you’vve got to knoww that hurts like hell!”

He softens, and brushes a stray curl away from your forehead.

“Kar, you’re…you’re perfect for me…” Suddenly, he pushes you into his chest. He’s still kneeling a little so his chin can rest comfortably on your head. His arms are firmly wrapped around you.

It takes you a moment to realize he’s crying, chest moving in tiny heaves and hiccuped breaths whistling in the air.

Nervously, and with a full appreciation of the irony of the situation, you tap his leg (it being the only place you can reach with your arms locked at your sides by his).

“Eridan, hey. You okay bro?”  _ No _ , your mind helpfully supplies a second later.  _ He’s crying, dumbass.  _ Because sinking to the level of arguing with yourself is simply routine for you, you take the bait. _ Well, it’s not like I’ve ever seen one of them cry, in a movie or something. How was I supposed to fucking know?  _ You counter. The nagging voice stays quiet, but you’re left with the unmistakable feeling of having lost the argument.

At a loss for what to do and lacking mobility of your limbs, you rest your head gently upon his chest.

“It’s okay.” you whisper hoarsely, unsure sure of whether it’s true. You doubted it. Not if you were involved. “You’re going to be okay-” After a moments pause: “Eridan.”

His arms tighten, and you can’t help but squirm a little. “Yeah.” He says, with sudden conviction. “It will. It’s all gonna be okay, Kar. Wwe’re so pale.” His claw traces along your neck. “Pale as bone.”

Nestled in the arms of a very dear and familiar stranger, you hear an alien voice rise up your throat and into the balmy air. “Pale as bone.” He affirms, yielding and soft. The sound is swallowed up in the heavy air, but the exalting, feverish shake of the rings against your neck lets you know he heard.


	8. Chapter Eight

Eridan’s hands find their way to the collar of your shirt, with the unfamiliar blue sign on the pocket. 

“Now that that’s over…” he grins, and begins to unbutton the shirt. 

Embarrassed, you attempt to step away. Eridan’s hands hold tight on the collar.

“You don’t have to!“ you squeak. You think your face might permanently end up flushed if you keep this up. If  _ Eridan  _ keeps being like this. 

“I knoww.” He responds, a dreamy look on his face. “I wwant to though. I’vve dreamed about this so long.” He pauses, before hastily adding, with an embarassed laugh: “In. Y’noww in a pale wway. Not like that! Not that I’m opposed to vacillation, if you wwant-“

The topic is headed from embarrassing to mortifying. Like the trolley conductor scrambling to only hit the man, you act in haste. 

You stand on the tips of your bare feet and grab the front of his shirt, pulling him downwards. He abides, seemingly more in confusion than anything else. 

You lean forward and press a soft kiss to his forehead. 

“I know, dumbass.”

Your feet plop back against the floor and your hold on Eridan’s shirt is released. He stays bent over for a few moments, apparently in shock. 

You take the opportunity to undo a few buttons on his shirt, because  _ this pale nonsense can go both ways, dammit  _ . 

His attention snaps back into your orbit, eyes searching yours with a burning intensity. 

He promptly lifts you up around the waist and kisses you on the mouth. 

Time seems to stand still, like in a movie. You stare, shocked, at his eyelids and wonder why romcom protagonists always made flutterbeasts in the acid tract sound so pleasant. 

There’s a vague panic building in the back of your thinkpan, but it’s increasingly difficult to focus on. Legs hanging limp, your eyelids fall shut, gravity working towards the perfect shot of romance. 

The only thing you can concentrate on is the feeling of Eridan’s lips, cold on yours. A tingle sparks down your helpless spine, an uncontrolled point of clarity in the haze. 

Eridan’s lips travel downwards, from the corner of your mouth to your cheekbone. 

Panic at the increasing proximity of his pointed teeth to your neck is absent, but you’re too caught up in the fog of whatever is happening to dwell on it. 

You remember with clarity the feeling of Eridan’s lips on your jugular, the skin glazed violet from a dart of his tongue. 

Eridan’s thumbs press gently at the soft space between your hips and gills. 

You gasp, and your limbs attempt to curl up, pushing through the air before collapsing limply. 

Eridan breaks the kiss. He’s lowering himself, and now you’re in his lap, too dizzy to be panicked, too aware to be calm. 

Eridan’s murmuring something, but you’re too lost in your thinkpan for the better part of you to understand the words

He says something else, a question, and the bit of you that manages to skim a meaning clumsily raises your arms, half guided by Eridan’s hands. You barely notice. Whatever’s going on outside is lost on you; you’re stranded in the flood of your thinkpan, leadenly grasping towards the surface. 

You remain trying to sort through the fog in your thinkpan with a clumsy hand. When you finally manage to fully open your eyes* and focus on the churning water in front of you, Eridan has slipped off your shirt and pants. You’re sitting at the edge of the water, propped up against Eridan’s palms. 

“Hey Kar.” Eridan says casually when he sees your eyes open. 

He’s shed his thick, sign-emblazened vest, and you can see the gray of his skin through the wet undershirt. 

“Can you sit on your owwn?” He asks.

You take a moment to process the question and remember how to move your lips to answer it. It takes another moment to fight back the feeling of vomit rising in your throat.

“I think so.” 

He tentatively loosens the grip of his hands on your shoulders. You sway before shakily righting yourself. 

He nods, and gestures shamelessly at your hips. “Just take those off and then get in. Test the wwater wwith your toes first. I tried to get the right temperature for you, but…” 

“It’s not like you would know.” You finish for him. Your voice sounds hollow in your ears. If you strain, you swear you can hear the words lingering, echoing constantly off the marble.

“Yeah. I figured you’d want it hot, since you are, but noww wwith your gills…” 

You know now that he’s tallying your features in his thinkpan, assessing them. Hot-  _ lowblood. _ Small-  _ lowblood _ . Weak- _ lowblood _ . Gills-  _ highblood.  _

Doing that is just multiplying by zero, you figure. Any aspect of a mutant is just a shitty part of an even shittier traitorous whole, according to the masses of troll kind, the universe, and any godly entities spitting on the expanses of creation. 

Eridan is so dumb sometimes. Dumb and  _ soft  _ and decent and you don’t think you’ll ever be able to crack why he’s wasting it all on  _ you.  _

You can’t crack why it’s making you want to retch all over the marble floor either. You feel a deep itching, under the skin, accompanied by a new, unfamiliar flavor of shame. It joins the horde, you figure. 

“I”m not complaining!” Eridan adds plaintively. “I  _ love  _ your gills, I just- I didn’t know.” He seems disconcerted by the idea. His posture hardens the slightest bit, his shoulders squaring. 

You watch him nervously. In your rush to process his emotions before he does, you lean forward slightly. Your toe dips into the water without your volition. It’s hot, but not any more than showers in a hive without a water cooling system. 

You drop into the water noisily, feeling the heat surround you up to your shoulders. You wait for it to scald you, but the heat is smooth and gentle. The nervous, itching feeling in your thinkpan and under your skin intensifies. 

A shock of cold grazes your shoulder. You open your eyes, reluctantly, to see Eridan’s slightly concerned face swimming in your vision. 

“You alright, Kar?” He asks. 

“What the hell was that?” you blurt out, before you lose the nerve. 

“You just got in kind of suddenly-“ Eridan begins, apparently mollified by your crass response. 

Your dull claws make contact with your temple. “No”, you interrupt, feeling increasingly nervous for no logical reason. “What was that? With the kissing.” You swallow a lump in your throat. “You kissing me and all that shit.” 

Eridan looks a little affronted. “I’m your morail, I have the fuckin right-“ He pauses and seems to deliberate for a moment. When he speaks again, his voice is softer, consoling, his eyes creased affectionately. 

“Sorry, I just. I felt like wwe wwere being interfered wwith. In my blood. Y’noww.” You don’t have any idea what he’s fucking talking about. You nod slightly anyway, just glad he’s not angry. 

Eridan grabs a few bottles from the nearest shelf, pausing to scan the labels. He squints at you and back to the array of bottles. 

“Does your hair get oily?” He asks as he pulls down a soft-looking violet cloth. 

“ _ What _ ? I mean, sure, but why did yo-“

“Nevermind!” Eridan interupts, sliding one of the bottles back onto the shelf with a rattle. “I like howw it is noww.  _ So  _ fucking soft. Kar, you’re  _ such  _ a pale-stud, I cannot believe-“

“Eridan, why did you-“ you swallow. “Why’d you trigger my-“ You can’t look at him or you’ll be reminded he’s  _ terrifying  _ and lose the nerve. Your claws are particularly fascinating all of a sudden. “Why did you make me helpless like that?”

You glance upwards. Eridan has paused, smiling. He laughs a little and flashes over to you, quick as lightning. 

His fingers graze your face. You duck, try to flinch away, but he locks his hand under your cheekbone and holds you still. He’s still smiling like he’s just heard the funniest joke in the empire. 

He paps you a little with your free hand and you hate how good it feels, how you can’t help relaxing a little under his claws. 

“That’s wwhy!” He says, tapping your nose. “You’re getting yourself all wworked up, I’m just helping you  _ relax  _ .” 

“Also,” he continues, drawing himself closer to you, “you’re so fuckin pitiable sometimes I can’t help myself.”

He kisses you on the forehead, trailing down your face. You’re petrified- this is so much worse when you know it’s coming. 

For a moment, the only noise is the soft bubbling of the water and your shallow, terrified breaths. 

“Let’s just finish getting cleaned up and go to coon, alright?” He whispers, his tone coddling. He pulls away from your face to look you in the eyes. His hands pull away from your face.

You feel a rush of relief course through your body. 

He pours some of the stuff from a bottle onto his hand and starts massaging your head. You almost protest, tell him you can do it yourself, but you’re so  _ tired  _ and if you manage to ignore the uneasiness of a seadweller’s claws on your skull...it feels kind of nice. Really nice, actually. 

It’s the sort of pale thing you would have gushed over in a shitty book or movie. It’s not like you have any right to complain about earlier. He’s just your morail, he’s doing what’s right. You were overreacting, you figure. 

You let exhaustion weigh down the unease in your stomach and head, and surrender yourself to the daze of Eridan’s hands. 


	9. Chapter Nine

You balance comfortably on the blade’s edge between awake and asleep.

Eridan is surrounding you, not even vaguely ashamed of how touchy he’s being. His touch lingers longer than it’s needed, leaving featherbeast-bumps on your skin. You let him touch your bare neck and belly without protest, exhaustion serving as a suitable substitute for trust.

He seems enamored by your body; your mutation must be a novelty that even a seadweller would be fascinated by. Or disgusted, when the newness of your blood ran dry.

The thought has attempted to nudge its way into your thinkpan more than few times since Eridan’s having rescuing, a conscious anxiety towards the unreadable ticking clock on your bloodpush.

You’re starting to realize that worrying about the future is a strange novelty when you’ve always had to focus on surviving the present.

You wake up like starch-cake syrup comes out of the bottle: in little bits with no sense of hurry.

The first time, your eyes don’t even open. You’re immensely comfortable, and the cool something surrounding you spells out “Safety” in your thinkpan like bubble-wrap and a suit of armor.

You curl your limbs inward a little tighter, your arms clutching the comfortable coolness like a fresh-hatched with their lusus. That feels good, your brain sleepily notices. You fumble to get your legs lodged around the feeling too. When you’re done, you fall back under without a further thought.

The second time, you wake to the unmistakable feeling of being watched. You feel a faint twinge of annoyance at that, because whatever you’re floating in is as comfortable as ever; opening your eyes seems an excessive labor.

You keep your eyes closed and stubbornly feign sleep.

But the itching feeling on your eyelids doesn’t relent, and as your foggy thinkpan becomes more awake, you seem to remember the dangers of being watched.

Your eyes open, and then immediately close again in a flinch.

The coolness surrounding you grips you under the arms and thrusts you to the surface. Hands, you register.

Staring down Eridan Ampora while sitting buck-naked in a too-big recooperacoon is a far weirder situation than your thinkpan is equipped to deal with on a short notice.

A moment passes and then he’s _howling_ , hunched over and feigning wiping a tear from the corner of his eye.

“It’s not that funny.” You say, mostly because you’re at a loss at what else to do. Eridan just laughs harder.

“You, you-“ He struggles to get out the words between snickers. “You opened your- _ hmmph _ , opened your eyes...in the sopor!” He flicks his claws towards his eyes and suppresses another cackle.

“I don’t usually do that.” You say, which is immediately evident as being the worst defense possible.

“Of course you don’t, Kar.” He replies playfully. You don’t respond. 

You’re looking at Eridan, really looking, and sure, you’d seen him without glasses plenty of times, he liked to take them off when on the husktop, but it’s weird seeing him without his hair gel or his rings. His hair appears to develop loose ringlets when wet, and they crowd out the dignified angles of his face.

Maybe if you ignored the gills, let the curls round him out, kept his mouth closed-

Well. Maybe he could even look like someone you would know.

You get the urge to playfully flip his purple streak over his face, but your arms are still mostly numb and buried in sopor and he’s so tall that you dismiss the thought.

Eridan is now leaning against his side of the recooperacoon, watching you silently.

The pleasant cloudiness is evaporating from your thinkpan and the situation becomes increasingly unbearable as it does.

You try to instinctively hide in your clothes, only to be reminded of your own lack of them.

Everything below your biceps is still in the sopor, deep in a sluggish numbness. The disconnect is disconcerting, between your head and your body. Maybe it could be pleasant if you grew accustomed to it, but right now you feel like the captain of a punctured vessel, losing soldiers to the void of space every moment.

Eridan smiles, and there’s something sharp behind it. You don’t meet his eyes. You imagine yourself looking up, and him cutting into you, you bleeding and falling to pieces without him ever moving his claws.

He’s running his claws gently over the top layer of your hair. You know it’ll stick up ever more than usual at that, covered in cooling slime, but Eridan doesn’t seem to care. A kiss is pressed to the top of your skull.

Your eyes dart upwards for a split second, just long enough to see the pearly flash of his teeth as he licks his lips clean.

The shark’s grin he gives you when he catches you glancing leaves no doubt to his intentions. You get the urge to dive under the slime (There’s definitely enough of it, you don’t think you ever used this much in a half-sweep) and never rise. But there’s a nervous fear settling into your thinkpan, a memory of you opening your eyes and his arms hooking you, pulling you up-

Eridan seems to be in an exceptionally good mood. He swings himself over the side of the recooperacoon in one motion, and you avert your eyes to avoid looking at his lower half. You don’t have to look at him to know he’s rolling his eyes.

There’s a type of smooth carpeting around the coon’, and it soaks up the sopor that Eridan’s departure leaves. The greenish color fades into white, becoming immaculate again.

There must be a recycling process, a sort of chamber underneath where the sopor is gathered and reused. It’s the fanciest fucking thing you hadn’t known existed. In your hive, you had just stepped into an old metal pan and dumped it back in after wringing as much as possible from your hair and skin to reuse.

The drones couldn’t have built it, couldn’t have built anything in this ship, you realize.

Everything Eridan had was a million tiny pieces put together, a far cry from the concrete hives that had dotted the plains of your life.

You imagine tiny gray hands carving and welding and polishing; when you swaddle yourself in a towel and step out of the coon, your thinkpan conjures the prick of tiny bones against your walkpads.

You notice Eridan’s wandered into an adjacent room. The doorway casts a sliver of white light on the floor, dissolving back into darkness before it reaches your corner of the room.

It’s your first moment alone since Ascension day, without Eridan’s gaze on your skin.

You unwrap the towel to scrub the slime from your skin and hair, taking advantage of the moment of privacy. Afterwards, you wring the towel into the carpet, watching it disappear.

As you step into the light of the doorway where Eridan had disappeared, the change in light makes your vision sting. The daze of the sopor is staying past its due in your limbs and thinkpan.

You lean against the doorway, blinking in the light and feeling the cool shock of tile underneath your walkpads. You take in the ablution block, noting with unease that you didn’t recognize at least half the devices strewn about the block.

Eridan is whistling and palming gel into his hair. His rings are scattered across the rockslab like veins of gold in a glittering cliff-face.

“Kar!” He beams into his own reflection in the reflection disk, or perhaps at the other you he sees in the background of the image.

You linger, frozen, in the doorway. The bright lights reflect off the twinkling surface of the block, imparting the feeling of being a hoofbeast in the headlights of an impending shuttle.

He waits for a moment before drumming his nails on the rockslab and huffing petulantly.

Eridan has contorted his face into a caricature of pitiful need. He widens his eyes and implores your presence with his hands.

Eridan pulls you towards him and clutches you like he’s trying to become one. His chin is nestled in the messy nest of your hair and his arms absorb you into his chest. Through his thin shirt, you can feel his cool epidermia, the layers of muscle, his ribs, and rising to the surface of it all, the beat of his bloodpusher against your cheek. It beats at an icy fever pace to the pattern of your tremulous breath.

“You’re going to havve to be on your owwn for a wwhile today.” Eridan mumbles reluctantly into your hair. His tone seems to suggest that incredulously, he genuinely any considers moment not in your abrasive presence a despicable prospect.

You think, not for the first time, that Eridan must be batshit fucking crazy. Maybe all highbloods were. It actually seemed pretty likely, now that you thought about the highbloods you had known.

There isn’t a thrill at the prospect of time alone, of being on a looser leash for a while. There’s mostly just more of that leaden feeling making itself a hive in your guts. Eridan’s a seadweller, but he's your friend, your morail, you guess, but mostly he’s the only island of familiarity in the ascended void of space.

As you dress into a shiny violet shirt and pants, which you can’t constitute as clothes more than thin cloth made for lounging in the purgatory between sleep and activity, as your bare walkpads are lead down the hallway of movie glimpses, as Eridan leaves you in an extravagantly comfortable and unfamiliar living block, as you’re left alone for the first time in two days. Well. You start to realize when Eridan’s a block away, it feels like it might as well be an uncharted galaxy.


	10. Chapter Ten

Eridan leaves the door open. It’s oddly comforting, the stretch of light from the hallway like an outstretched hand, a tether connecting you to the troll who saved your life. 

The walls of the room are rounded by legume-sack chairs. You’re disconcerted to find that they lack the familiar lumpiness and poking of a sack stuffed with legumes. When you touch one, it gives way under your hand like a sponge, enveloping the tips of your fingers in yielding gelatinous material. You withdraw your hand like you had been been bit.

One wall is made of hard green cartilage like the surface of a telegrub. There’s a shelf stacked with movie discs, and even with a conspicuous lack of mode to play them, you pore through the titles. For a while, you sit on the soft floor, a distance away from the unfamiliar not-legume sacks, surrounded by a rising barricade of CD-disc containers. 

Seeing as they’re Eridan’s, it comes as no surprise to you that the movies are mostly a mixture of romcoms and dramatic historical war dramas. You set the latter aside with delicate disinterest and start constructing a stack of Reesee Wither filmography, fondly reading over the blurbs of familiar films and excitedly examining the covers of more obscure ones. 

Even with the faces of glamorous Alternian moviestars to keep you company, after a while boredom begins to itch under your skin. 

Realizing nervously that you had no hope of remembering the order of the discs on the shelf, you opt for your own system. You place the romcoms neatly along the top shelf, and the war dramas which you had half-interestedly scanned along the bottom.

You’re left standing alone in the recreation block. It’s immaculate, like off the cover of a blueblood magazine. The air is still, and the only sound and movement is your breathing, disturbing the sort of glossy purgatory that surrounds you. 

Each breath is heavy in your breath-sacs, like something thick struggling down a straw. 

Perching at the entrance of the still-open door, you look left and right, and step into the hallway. 

You recognize the posters on the left, leading you towards the entrance block and the shining ablution. The thought of it makes you feel sick.

There must be something about space, you think, that makes your immune system flounder. 

Of course, Eridan seems fine. Great, even. 

You see your reflection in the light reflecting off one of the posters. You look unreal, the distortion of the glass smoothing your image into an off-color ersatz of itself. You lift your hand to your cheek, but the reflection wavers and breaks before you feel skin. 

The hallway seems to go on forever, with unmarked doors shut tight. You’re fascinated, in a morbid way, by the prospect that every door has an accompanying block; this isn’t a ship of war, that’s clear, and you haven’t the slightest idea how a residential ship fills so much space. You wonder if they’re just empty, put there to confuse visitors, and the thought doesn’t register as being  _ unlike  _ a cruel game a highblood would play. 

The door to the block full of movie-discs is behind you. You had closed it when you had left, and if you step back it blends into the rest of the hall, just another identical and unknown door. 

There’s a nervous tic to the beat of your bloodpusher, and the thought of returning to that newly familiar and empty block makes you dig your stubby claws into your palm. 

In a moment of compounded bravery, boredom and idiocy, you decide to explore.

You don’t see any other trolls, thank the fucking empress. In the back of your thinkpan, you wonder how this ship is maintained. As far as you’re aware, it’s just you and Eridan. And the helmsman, you suppose, but a battery doesn’t really count. 

At that thought, a bit of bile stings your throat at the unspoken rule that  _ you  _ don’t really count either. 

You keep the poster by the movie-block emblazoned in the forefront of your mind as you move slowly, cautiously down the hallway. Your surroundings are almost hostile in their hospitality, like the sweet smell luring small flybeasts into the pitcher of a carnivorous plant. 

The temperature is comfortable, a far cry from the alternating stifling heat and frigid gusts around your former hive. Not having to steel yourself against the temperature leaves you feeling unfamiliarity comfortable, like how you imagine Gamzee feels when he eats sopor. 

Wary of an easy situation, the ship somehow leaves you both on edge and with a feeling of having let your guard dangerously down. 

You pause, and faintly, just barely on the edge of your hearing, there’s voices. Too quiet for you to make out the words, but one has a sort of accent that sounds familiar. 

Your bare walkpads dart down the hallway and you pause again, listening, and-  _ yes  _ !, it’s Eridan’s voice, he hadn’t gone far at all. 

You don’t stop to examine why finding him makes you so happy. He’s your morail, you guess. Of course you’d want to see him. 

You creep towards the voice; your walkpads barely touch the ground, like when someone in your hivestem got culled by a drone when you were 4 and you spent the next few pedigrees walking on eggshells, too scared to garner any attention. 

You almost trip on air when you come close enough to hear words. There’s your name, in a voice that’s not Eridan’s.

Her voice is calm and deep and you know, despite having having heard it only once or twice, who it is.  _ Kanaya.  _

Kanaya, _ smart, lovely Kanaya _ . You  _ adore  _ her, and the sound of her voice makes you want to bolt in the other direction. 

You had been so caught up in the amazement of being alive that you hadn’t considered how,  _ or whether  _ , you were going to contact your friends. It was as if on Ascension Day, as you and Eridan left your pupahood planet and breached the galaxy, the world outside of Eridan and you had ceased to exist, or was separated, like a shadow of a memory. 

Kanaya was talking about you.  _ Does she know?  _ you think frantically, hand gripping your wrist as if hiding your veins would make them disappear, make you not have to confront this. 

Eridan had made it so  _ easy _ , you think darkly. He showed up, and he knew; there was no fighting it.

Kanaya laughs, and even through a wall and hallway it’s the clearest you’ve ever heard her voice. It’s the clearest you’ve heard her voice and you have to walk away,  _ but she said your name, and this isn’t a conversation you’re supposed to hear-  _

You don’t feel bad about eavesdropping, really, but you’re almost certain that Eridan would have differing feelings on the manner, and that and the sheer terror of confronting Kanaya in your too-thin sleep-clothes with Eridan’s sign like a collar on your chest lead you down the hallway and back towards the room previous: reluctantly, at first, but the courage of exploration is brief and your fear of Eridan’s wrath is strong and so the last few steps towards the remembered poster are in a run. 

You try to open the door. It doesn’t budge. 

You nervously wipe your hands on your shirt, and they slip off. The door still won’t budge. Shit. Fuck. All of expletives, packed like ravers at an Xoloto concert, apply. 

After three more attempts, you come to face the obvious; the doors lock upon closing. You try a few other doors in the hallway, and find the same result. 

“Karkat?” You hear his voice behind you, and whirl around like an invalid facing the culling drone. 

“Hey Eridan.” You gulp. 

“I wwas talkin’ to Kan. Wwanna come?” He’s endearingly casual, and it reminds you of the pictures he’d send you during romcom marathons in earlier sweeps. It seems absurd, this fear you have of him, the sense of  _ other  _ . You’re just two dipshits figuring it out. 

You drop your hand from the door as discreetly as possible. You can’t look, but you feel your sweaty palm leave an epitaph in the shape of your skin on the surface. 

Eridan scrutinizes you for a moment before appearing to come to the revelation. He gasps in the dramatic way that he does for just about anything with you. It’s just about the cutest thing in the world, you think, except for crabdad sleeping upside down in the grubblock after marathoning movies with you on 12th Perigree’s Eve. 

“Oh! You wwere probably looking for the ablution block. Shit, lemme showw you.” He goes to the door opposite and presses his finger into a sleek black sensor above the knob. A flash of light, and he’s turning the knob. While he’s turned, you press your own finger to the identical sensor of the movie-block’s knob. When you turn, the knob remains resistant and the door closed. 

You enter yet another glistening ablution block, and are struck by a sense of miserable familiarity as you leadenly lean over the tap and stare at the unfamilar troll in the mirror’s reflection. 

You should be happy; you can’t take being able to see one of your closest friends for granted. You are happy. It’s just complicated. 

It would all be as close as it gets to perfect if Sollux was here too. The thought burns a little and you try to push it aside, but thinking of him tears a sort of rift open in your bloodpusher that you can’t ignore. _Where was he?_ _What happened to the people you knew? What happened to all of you? (You’re being ungrateful, a seadweller pities you and you’re alive, you can’t ask for much else, Eridan_ ** _saved_** _your useless ass-)_

Your days on planet, trolling friends and growing up, seemed so far away. It was only three nights ago, you think, that ascension happened, but it already felt like another lifetime, separated from the present like an dissolving dayterror in the waking hours. 

The only place to go is forward, in this maze of a ship towards the only trolls in the Empire with maps. 

Dizziness and a sort of nausea are swirling in tandem within you. You swallow them down your throat. A nervous breakdown tastes an awful lot like choking on your own blood, you observe queasily. You don’t really have a choice. You step into the hallway, towards the voices of two trolls of whom you pity very much and know nothing at all. 


	11. Chapter Eleven

Kanaya isn’t surprised to see you; in fact, she seems to dismiss the trunk-beast in the block as easily as if she didn’t know of it at all.

_ No _ , you think warily _ , that’s not true _ . She looks at you with something satisfied in her eyes, an approving little nod when Eridan ushers you in front of the extraordinarily expensive husktop and into a chair that feels uncomfortably like close to a pile. Your face flushes at the thought, but you figure you’ve been red enough for the last few days for it not to make a difference.

She smiles, and she feels like home, but a home with sharp edges and locked doors keeping others out and you in. She glances up and behind you to Eridan, and flashes him a characteristically restrained but conspiratory smirk.

“Karkat, I’m so very glad to see you well!” She grins, and it’s a genuine grin. You relax a little. You’re usually anxious, but right now you’re just being unreasonable. Kanaya’s your most trustworthy friend. So what she’s been talking to Eridan? They’re friends too.

“Yeah, he’s been settling in-“ Eridan looms over you to jokingly rest his elbows upon your shoulders. There’s no real weight behind it, you’d probably collapse if there was. It’s a firmly playful action. His hands dangle under your chin, in front of your neck. You blink a little as the dazzle of his rings, which occupy his fingers in a relatively restrained amount in his casual state but are by no means absent, reflect the light of the husktop. The glare of it pricks your eyes, and for a moment, it feels like all you can see is the white of Kanaya’s fangs and the golden rings of lights speckled with jewels.

You sit up a little straighter and rest your chin against his hands to avoid the glare. You jolt for a moment at the chilliness of his skin. Eridan laughs and shoves his cold fingers back under your chin.

“Cold bulgewipe-“ you gripe, before reaching up and slapping him on the cheek. Eridan makes a sound that sounds more like a moan of pleasure than pain. You’re 70% it was a joke. At the possibility of the other 30%, you give a chuckling Kanaya the most apologetic look you can muster while still half-wrestling your grinning iceblock of a morail.

“Careful, I might have to resort to my known quadrant vice!” Kanaya comments playfully. That makes you stop play-fighting Eridan for a moment to glare at her. From the crinkle of her eyes and the soft, affectionate curve of her mouth, you come off less threatening than you’d like.

“If you try to auspice us, I will start a fucking riot, you madwoman.” You grumble. Eridan takes your moment of indignant protest to shove his cold hands down your loose shirt, making you shriek and squirm before sliding to the floor in escape.

For a minute or so, the room is only filled with the sound of toothless insults and fits of giggles. Your ribs hurt, but the floor is soft under you. You close your eyes.

You never got to talk to your friends like this, too afraid of identification to use the shitty voice or video cam on your husktop.

There’s a lining of melancholy to it anyway. You miss something you never had. You have it now, and it burns you in its wake.

As he finally comes down from the throws of his laughing fit, Eridan plucks you off the ground without warning and places you firmly in his lap. He settles back in the chair and faces a bemused Kanaya.

Eridan’s arm crosses your chest. The shirt sleeve falls to reveal your shoulder, and his grip is too tight to correct it. Tight, but not painful. Not unless you resist.

Kanaya smiles and makes a temple of her fingers to rest her chin.

“You look good. Better than when I last saw you.” She comments. The last time she had saw you had been when you were 8 and gathered the bravery and stupidity required to send a blurry photo.

“You should brush his hair though.” Her eyes rise to Eridan, and he ruffles your head affectionately.

“It’s cute like this.” He rejects firmly.

“So, uh- what were you two talking about before?” You ask.

“You, mostly.” She replies casually. “Eridan wants make to make you some properly fitting clothes, with his sign and such.” She glances to him, and Eridan removes one of the arms around your waist to fake-gag.

“I’vve got to  _ burn _ those bluebitch clothes he wwas wwearing yesterday, him wwearing some dead landdwweller’s sign-“ He shudders, and then adds. “No offense to you, a course. You’re jade. That’s different.”

You see something flash in her eyes that don’t quite understand, but a moment and it’s gone. Perhaps it was just the husktop. Signals can get lost in space, you guess.

“Or to him, I’m assuming.” She says, and if she’s uncomfortable, she doesn’t show it.

You can’t see his face from your position in his lap, but you can tell from the change in his posture that he’s suddenly sporting some sort of grin.

“Oh, but he’s not-!” He trills, and his hands trace along the side of your chest. You suck in a breath, as his claws dance over fabric so thin it might as well not be there. There’s a tingling in your spine and a sort of pleasant numbness building in your head. You let your head fall back and hit Eridan’s chest softly. The air greets your exposed neck.

“I’m gonna showw her, okay?” He whispers in your ear, and it takes a moment to register. By that time, his hands have found purchase at the bottom of your shirt.

“What?” You mumble, too slowly. Eridan paps you gently on the cheek, and you can see the faint green blush of a voyeur on Kanaya’s cheeks.

The cloth on Eridan’s chest is soft, not the hard padding of a military costume. Something deeply ingrained recoils within you as the bottom of your stomach makes contact with the air.

Your movements are clumsy at best, but you lurch upwards in the vague direction of the gill-hole you assume to be his ear.

“Does she know?” You ask, and even pap-heaviness must not be able to conceal the panic in your eyes, because Eridan’s now-visible face frowns, large and looming over you.

“Wwell, not about this-“ His hands trace your sides lightly and you shiver. You’re not sure if it’s from the cold of your hands or the inconvenient whims of pale serendipity.

“But yes. For almost as long as I havve.” He confirms. It should be a relief. You think you’re going to vomit.

“Are you alright?” Kanaya’s face swims in your vision. She looks unsure; it’s a distinctly unfamiliar expression for her to have. “He doesn’t have to show me, I’m sure you can tell me through Trollian-“

“Wwell, I wwasn’t going to  _ noww _ -!” Eridan snaps, and you hold up a hand placatingly. The tension melts from him almost instantly, and Kanaya seems visibly relieved.

“It’s fine.” You grumble, and the deep intake that comes next is more an anchor than breathing. You can do this, it says. You don’t have a choice.

You lift your shirt. Kanaya’s eyes are scalpels wielded by the empire’s most pitying vivisectionist.

“Eridan says they’re gills, he thinks-“ Kanaya’s eyes widen, and she doesn’t seem happy, exactly, but she nods encouragingly towards you, never lifting her eyes from your stomach, “well-“ you continue, “They’re pretty fucked up. And I don’t think they work.”

Eridan jolts and makes an indignant noise. “I did *not* say that. Besides, wwhether they wwork or not isn’t important. It’s-its about the *symbol* of it, you knoww.”

A bitter taste emerges at the back of your digestion-tube. It’s not a symbol of anything, you know. You’re red-hot and tiny and covered in vestigial organs you can’t use; a miscellaneous joke of a troll.

“Are those the only ones?” Kanaya asks, and the succeeding moment of silence seems to urge her into clarifying. “I don’t mean to pry, but gills must be taken into account when making any quality garments…” A moment passes.

Eridan taps your cheek with his claw as if to alert you into the conversation. “Wwell,” he asks, “Do you?”

Kanaya makes a surprised face and sends Eridan a look bordering confusion and jest.

“I had figured you had-“ Her eyes fall to you, and you shuffle in an attempt to casually sling your shirt sleeve back over your shoulder. You know what this looks like. She’s implying-. You’re as red as the sun at noon. Floors are fascinating to observe. You would know.

Eridan seems mostly nonplussed. “It’s been 3 nights, Kan. Adjusting to space and shit. Even I’m not that insatiable.”

Eridan drops his chin to your shoulder, and you feel his cool breath, catch a shimmer of fangs as white as the star-bleached earth in an Alternian drought. He’s grinning lechorously, and you tilt your head back instinctively to create distance from the danger of his jaw.

You realize, as your neck is bared towards the screen and your eyes pressed tight against your lids, that you had done exactly what Eridan wanted you to do.

“Plus, I think Kar’s a little shy.” Eridan says, smugness permeating the words as his noses along the column of your throat.

You wait for Kanaya to tell him off, something about decency, but she just laughs. Eridan, ever prone to jolting displays of immaturity, leaves a raspberry on your throat and pulls away, snickering. You do not squawk as you try to pull up the loose collar of the slippery shirt to wipe away his spit, because _ gross _ . It doesn’t work, and your neck is left cold and wet until Eridan graciously uses his scarf to wipe away his salvia, still giggling. Kanaya rolls her eyes.

You’re still breathing heavily. Everything feels hot, almost feverish, and you focus on Kanaya’s face. She’s swimming in your vision, and in the whirlpool she’s unfamiliar, the angles of her face transforming into maleficent caricatures of themselves.

You think you’re going to be sick. You close your eyes and tuck your head against Eridan’s chest, trying to block out your surroundings. You make sure to angle your shoulders to cover your neck. The protection it provides is all in your thinkpan, you know. Eridan could rip your arm out of your socket like snapping a dry twig.

“Are you alright, Karkat?” Kanaya asks, and when you look up, her face is kind and familiar as ever, that of your oldest friend.

Eridan tenses as if to respond for you, but you uncurl a bit and manage to eke out a muffled “M’fine”.

You’re starting to get awfully tired of people smirking at you like you’re some sort of wriggler.

“Well,” Kanaya trails off. There’s an intentional breathiness to her voice that leaves her assumptions regarding the two of you pretty obvious. It’s a sort of encouragement, in the crude way that some frat cerulean slapping the shame globes of his morail after scoring some red fling in the barracks is encouragement.

“The charts for measuring will be sent to you. I’ll send the ones for gills and without, to be sure.” She pauses, unsure. Hesitantly, she adds; “I’m sure, if you would be so inclined, that you could find a suitable tailor closer to you, in whatever section of the galaxy you’re in currently. I appreciate it, to be sure, but I’m not sure why you would still..”

Eridan tenses and holds out his hand as if to grab hers. It pauses midair as he remembers the distance. The rings rattle as his hand *thumps* back onto the four-legged holding slab.

“Because you’re my friend, Kan.” He says finally, after the sort of pause borne of conviction rather than hesitance. “I wwasn’t going to just ascend and then…wwhat? Fuck off wwithout you guys?”

His hand tightens around you, and he leans his head against you. A happy little puff of air escapes his fangs as you touch him back, curving your hands along his arms to find skin. Kanaya watches, and something hard melts off her demeanor. She smiles, and it’s warm, with only the slightest peek of fangs.

You think vaguely that this sort of collective vulnerability leans into quadrant territory, but it’s hard to care when Kanaya rests her chin on her hands like she’s 5 sweeps, her eyes pensive and  _ kind _ , and Eridan’s holding your hands. You feel the kiss of cool air on your cheek. Your eyes slip shut like a content purrbeast. The glow of the husktop burns sweetly behind your lids like a sunset peeking through the curtains of your hive, and for a second, you don’t think you could anything better than what you are feeling now, safe and surrounded in this ship swaddled in the deafening cocoon of space.


	12. Chapter Twelve

Kanaya soon dismisses you two, citing her duties to the Mother Grub. She promises to contact Eridan as much as possible. She makes no such promise to you, but a minute nod from Eridan in response to the unspoken question is nearly as good. 

The screen is a flutter of pink and green as her arm reaches for the squeakbeast-controller, her sleeve forming a featherbeast wing that salutes you in a farewell. 

The connection ends, and Eridan’s hands are on your wrists, his rings heavy and cool on your skin. 

“We’re hungry.” He says, and his hands release you. He stretches, and it reminds you of a meowbeast basking in near-painful light of dawn. 

The meal block is another unfamiliar hallway away, you discover. It opens into a large, sleek sort of indoor plaza bigger than your old hive. You can see respite-cushions circling another expensive telegrub in the distance, and the walls shimmer slightly with the heat-like ripples familiar to you from the forcefield around an olive-bloods storage shed in your old hive block. You step closer to Eridan unconsciously. 

“Wwhat do you wwant?” He asks, opening and shutting cabinets without looking inside in a burst of a boyish, restless sort of energy.

You really hadn’t gotten this far. “Uh. A sandwich would be cool, I guess? I can make myself-“ Eridan’s already flitted over to a gargantuan box of silverish-purple that you now realize, with no small amount of amazement, is the largest grub-cooling chest you have ever seen. You could fit a troll in there, you think dizzily. You remember the horror terror stories lowbloods liked to spread as pupas, about seadwellers stuffing trolls and eating them with grubsauce. 

“Sliced fow-erm. Featherbeast and cheese alright? It’s got red sauce-fruit on it too.” He pulls out a tray of immaculate, near-geometric little sandwich squares. 

They’ve got little sticks through the top like a speared piece of cullbait. Who the hell pre-makes sandwiches for later? What a fucking dork.

“Sure. Gimme.” You make grabby hands at the sandwiches and he laughs and places them on the counter. They’re piled high like a fortress of grub loaf and meat, and the two of pick your way through them ravenously, as soon as Eridan shows you that you’re supposed to take the little spear out first. 

“It’s to hold them together, I think.” He says, and then pops a whole sandwich square into his mouth. You shrug and take a bite. 

Eridan swallows. “Hey, wwanna sit up here?” He asks, and holds his arms out to lift you. 

You take a few steps back, and jump onto the counter with the kind of agility honed from corralling a massive crustacean lusus. 

You smugly grab another sandwich square. “I’m not a fucking invalid, Eridan.” 

Eridan stabs little holes in the roof of his sandwich with the spear before getting bored and taking a bite. 

“You had to take a running start.” He notes playfully. 

“Really making it obvious that you’ve never run in your fucking life here dude.” You respond. A little bit of red sauce-fruit gets on your check and Eridan wipes it away with the back of his hand. 

“Wwhy do you say that?” He asks, cheerfully playing along. 

“All you do is stand back and shoot people from a mile away.” You respond with a grin, leaving the sandwich you’re working on your lap and mimicking holding a rifle with you arms, squinting your eyes like you’re focusing on a distant target. “Bet you hide behind a bush or rock while you do it too.” You glance at Eridan’s broad shoulders and long legs. “Pretty fucking big bush. Maybe something more arboreal.”

“I do not!” He defends with a mock gasp. “Also, that’s not howw you hold a gun. You’d get yourself blowwn up, Kar.”

“I shoot em from my airship.” He adds pompously. 

“Yeah, that’s why you need the glasses.” You respond, and the two of you bicker and laugh through the rest of the plate. 

When you’re gone, the two of you sit in companionable silence. Eridan’s legs swing softly. 

“Kar?” He says, so softly you can barely hear it. 

You consider pretending you didn’t hear. You glance over, and he’s looking down. You study his face in profile, his long nose and the shadows of his eyelashes on his cheekbones. 

“Yeah?” You reply. 

“I just-“ he starts, and his legs swing a little faster. His knuckles are square where he grips the counter under his hands. You could swear you see a crack from, and you place your hand on his without thinking.

The legs stop like the prongs of a smashed timepiece. 

He looks at you, and you feel physically overwhelmed by the weight of it. You feel something funny in your gut, and somewhere in the back of your mind you wonder where you had last seen something concave. 

But you can’t look away. Like when the drones executed a heretical traitor to the empire on the telegrub when you were 5, you can’t stop watching. Eridan smiles ( _ his teeth, his fangs, the trident through the throat, coming out the other side _ ) and he holds your hand in his. He grabs for the other one, and by the time you think of the possibility of moving it away, his long fingers are around your wrist. 

His fins are unwavering, unnaturally shock still, orbiting his face. The piercings shimmer around his head like satellites. 

( _ his eyes are intense, holding the weight of the ocean, holding down the weight of a terror unknown, feeding a beast in the deep- fuschia eyes look to camera, long live the empress, long live Alternia, long live the phantom pricks in your throat, the cherry red running down your neck and chest, red, red like the imperial fleet- _ )

“Pity doesn’t evven begin to describe how I feel about you.” He whispers, with the sort of sureness you’ve never felt about anything except your own demise. 

You frown. “I don’t understand shit.” You say, because you can’t put together any more words than that, not when you are cut into a million little pieces, trying to orbit yourself around anything. Eridan’s eyes are dark, and you can only see the slightest bit of yellow around the black of his iris, like a crest of light on the edge of a ravine. 

“I don’t understand-“ you say again, because that’s all you can say. 

Eridan sighs, not quite disappointed and not quite understanding, and he gives you a smile like the one in the jewelry shop, all soft with sharp edges. His hand snakes to the back of your neck, resting in the soft pale spot under your jaw. 

“You wwill, evventually. I promise you, Kar.” He leans forward and kisses you more softly than you could have imagined possible. You close your lids, but you can still see his wide, intense eyes in the darkness. 


	13. Chapter Thirteen

Something is shifting behind Eridan’s eyes when he pulls back from the feather-light kiss. It’s tumultuous, the emotion shifting like the prairie grass in the cool summer nights back at the hive. You want to help, but he’s uncharacteristically quiet, so you stand there, balanced with baited breath. It could be nothing, for you at least. Could be everything. It’s hard to tell with Eridan; he’s made up of so many little things, and so many big things, and he treats them all with the same strange mix of melodrama and self-repression. 

Finally, he breathes out a breath that whistles like a sunset breeze. You breath out too, releasing a breath you had only be half-conscious of holding.

His gills flutter, and his ear-holes tremble a little, a futile, vestigial movement out of water that seems impossibly fragile. 

You try to imagine you can feel your not-quite-gills tremble a little too, but if they do, you’re too accustomed to it to tell.

Eridan moves towards a massive lounge pad, sitting carefully like he was sporting stitches in his side and had to be sure not to stretch too much. His hand remains on your arm, soft but still compelling you to follow. 

Eridan sits in a sort of manufactured slouch of someone trying to be comfortable but not vulnerable, and not quite reaching either point because  _ it doesn’t work that way,  _ that’s why adrenaline is always pumping through your fucking veins, why you’re always listening for things you’re fearfully sure are too quiet to be heard. 

That’s why you see too-clearly the manufactured slouch of his shoulders, the transition from unconscious insouciance to this parody of softness that’s fitting him like the put-on expressions of pity in bad pale-porn, the alertness shining from behind the hazy editing of the eyes. 

This, you’re pretty sure, is the physical equivalent of Eridan slickly dropping into your Trollian notifications under the pretense of small-talk, a sort of preamble to the meat of his troubles, like whatever cryptic thing Vriska had said the other day or whether Sollux’s psionics and the chucklevoodoos really cancelled out like multiplying negatives, or whatever else was storming around his thinkpan. 

You’d like to think you know how to deal with Eridan, like to think that he thinks that too, otherwise you wouldn’t have warranted saving. 

“No, the weather is not nice today, in fact, considering we are in a vaccum, it is essentially non-fucking-existent. Yes, Sandra Bullck is a highly underrated actress. You know exactly what I’ve been up to, considering you’ve been there for the last 48 hours of it. There, now that your pleasantries are out of the way-“ 

You sit on the respite-cushion next to Eridan, gingerly, like anything this soft was some sort of predatory lure in disguise. Hey, you never knew, you don’t know, and you’re starting to accept the very real possibility that you will never know Jack-shit about anything going on ever. A blind troll could never have too much caution. You think of Terezi and there’s a sudden stinging in your eyes that you try to push back and into neatly marked boxes in the attic of your subconscious. 

Eridan’s mouth forms a little ‘o’. He frowns, slightly. “Do you havve a problem wwith it? Space, I mean?”

You blink, and fold halfway into a face-palm before sighing and flipping away the line of questioning with a flick of your hand. Eridan’s ring traces a line in the air, lingering for a few blinks after the motion has ceased. 

“No! What? Fuck, that’s not what this is about. Ask me later.” If you talk fast enough and with enough filler, you can avoid answering questions while the neurons are still figuring it all out in Eridan’s brain. 

You sigh, lean forward a little. You tilt your neck a bit and Eridan’s shoulders round out a little as his eyes track the curve of your throat. A familiar buzz starts bubbling under your skin, adrenaline to push down and ignore. If you wait it out, your nervous system will get too burnt out to bother with screaming in your thinkpan for a while. At least, you hope so. It would be nice. 

“You clearly want to say something, but you don’t want to be blunt.” You state, and Eridan smiles a little, soft and fond. He looks a little embarrassed, and a dusting of violet is brushed over the top of his cheekbones. 

“You wouldn’t have that problem.” He says, and for a moment you  _ know  _ you pity him for that alone, because he says it like it’s not a  _ bad thing  _ . 

You talk like a lowblood, that’s what it means, but that’s not what  _ he _ means. You’re consider saying this and put a stopper on it before the words reach your lips. You’d like to not fuck up a good thing, for once. 

“Did you-  _ do  _ you have a flush-crush on Sol?” Eridan asks, and it takes you a moment to realize that he had just cut to the fucking chase like you had asked him to. Still a little dazed in the high from the seadweller’s unintentional validation, you clumsily assemble your mental deadtective checklist to address the line of inquiry being presented. 

Step one, check for Words on Fucking Fire. These are words that cause fires, relationships, melodramatic teen bullshit, murder-suicides and explosions. More than one of these situations may apply, obviously. It’s all pretty cyclical. This one is easy. Sollux is the most apparent offender, because when Eridan and Sollux are involved in any way, the threat of apocalypse increases 6-fold. Secondly, there was the subject of flush-crushes. With the one asking being Eridan, this could be dangerous. Proceed with caution. 

“Did I- what? I-.” You sputter, because now you’re thinking about Sollux, and you  _ miss  _ him. You  _ miss  _ him like a lost limb. The grief of it all, of everyone, of Sollux but the others too, hits you at once. You are empty. You are full, packed to brim with loss, and somehow loss is a tangible  _ thing  _ that you have acquired a vast abundance of. Like adding negatives, you think, and it’s bordering on hysterical. 

It takes the smudgy plane of Eridan’s face for you to realize that you are crying, and it’s so fucking  _ stupid  _ , that you are crying, that you are crying over what you have lost and you can’t even clearly see what you have left.  _ The dam breaks  _ , and there are tears on your lashes and cheeks, beading on Eridan’s shirt and you clutch him, your breath escaping in rattling tandem with the faint march of his bloodpusher. 

_ The dam breaks, and the doomed ship is embraced by the event horizon.  _ Eridan is cool against your skin, and you can feel the red-hot of your body leaking into him. Eridan’s hand comes to rest against the back of your neck, and the sensation in your nerves is not a threat but a morbid promise. It’s the only promise you have. You cannot clutch any tighter, but you try,  _ oh how you try.  _

The void of space stretches endlessly around you, and the void of everything else yawns within you, and you and Eridan are the eclipse of bodies in the barycenter of it all. 


	14. Chapter Fourteen

The blackness spreads out from beyond you, specked with white and blue and yellow. A cruel, inhospitable universe peppered with cruel, survivable planets, and you, in this dim, beautiful sanctuary of a ship composed of sharp, clean lines. 

You know you are so very, very small. You know how easily your blood runs, how easily you run, because you can’t do much else. 

“What-“ Eridan asks, “if I told you I had saved him?” 

A moment, and then: “Did you?” It’s hard to imagine Sollux being saved by anyone, not for lack of worth but for abundance of capability. Sollux has never run from a thing in his life, for better or for worse. And maybe he hasn’t ever faced the Condesce’s Helmsman Retrieval Corps, but she hasn’t faced him either. 

You believe in Sollux Captor beyond the realm of faith and into the concrete edifice of fact. 

This is to say, that if Eridan thinks he has ‘saved’ Sollux Captor, the world has either gone inside out or he is what Terezi likes to refer to as ‘getting punked’. 

If you had anything to bet, it would go on the latter. 

“Yes. Yes, I have.” Eridan whispers elatedly. His fins are puffed in a victor’s taunt. 

Eridan is terrifying and powerful and yours, a seadweller who spared your life as easily as you had managed to scrape together every new breath. 

Sollux is urban gutter-trash with a lisp. He also makes a regular habit out of kicking Eridan’s ass and pretending it’s not pitch-flirting. 

You haven’t managed to survive this long without learning how to recognize a pattern. Mix Sollux and Eridan; observe as sexual tension forms throughout the solution. Take cover and watch the explosion. 

It’s not that you don’t miss Sollux. You miss Sollux in the way the feel-stubs long for the familiar grooves of a well-used blade. But like a blade, Sollux cuts, and unlike Eridan, you don’t think he has ever pitied you enough to abstain from inflicting a wound. 

It’s not like you blame him; you wouldn’t either. 

You wouldn’t admit it out loud, but for some trolls, too many trolls, you’d get cut a million times over. Not confessing is a formality; it is a secret everyone knows. 

You are a fucking mess, you think. The universe twinkles from the window, as empty and indifferent as ever. 

“Can I see him?” You whisper, voice shaky despite your attempts to steady it. 

“Of course, Kar. Wwhy the fuck wwould I tell you otherwwise?” Eridan responds, and it sounds like the easiest thing in the damn galaxy, slipping out from between his fangs. It takes you aback, for a moment. Why would I? Why would you? 

Because you’re cruel, emerges somewhere in your mind, and it doesn’t quite seem like a thought of your own, but it’s not not yours either. It’s like a different you, a different Karkat had whispered the words into his own ear, a secret slipping along a closed circuit of a not-quite-troll. 

It shocks you, and it feels like the words emerging in your mind has caused the feeling to recede in your fingers like your blood and limbs are a tide at low point. 

Because he’s cruel, and it’s true, but not to you. 

It is the most romantic realization you have ever come to in your short, miserable life. 

You don’t know why it makes you so sad. 

Sollux Captor is a long, slim form of flesh stapled together by some uncaring and indolent God. 

Even an apathetic God creates miracles though, and Sollux Captor was the sort of troll of whom something inside had been hollowed out in order to carry the weight of them all. 

When you were 4 1/2, you met Sollux Captor by getting into a fight with him in the ChewTube comments section. It’s often said that no one truly wins a fight on the internet. This is false. Sollux Captor remotely blew up your husktop, which is admittedly a pretty decisive win. 

After a few miserable weeks, a new husktop cobbled together out of old scrap like a metallic collage arrived on your hive-step. The accompanying note didn’t apologize, but it did claim that you made ‘2ome valiid poiint2’ regarding the quality of the Thresh Prince opening theme, which was as close as whichever Sollux was in control that day was gonna get. 

When you had logged onto the computer, there was a new handle added to your saved list in Trollian, twinArmageddons. The two of you had been… well, you’d been something ever since. 

You haven’t ever been sure what that something is, and if you don’t know, no one does. 

“This is relativvely small ship, all things considered.” Eridan is saying, in the voice he uses to talk about logistics and ships and other things that dissolve to gibberish in your thinkpan. “It takes almost no effort for him to powwer it; really, it’s a fucking waste of massivve proportions for him to be here, you don’t evven understand—“ Eridan shrugs. “But no fuckin wway someone else is gonna get him, so the lucky bastard just hangs here.” 

The two of you are in the bowels of the ship now, the ceilings near-brushing the tips of Eridan’s horns and decor becoming increasingly sparse. 

There’s something so crude about it, thinking about Sollux in terms of his psionics; you’re missing the point, you want to scream, because Sollux becoming a helmsman would be like the Condesce becoming a laborer. Sure, they might do it better than anyone else, but at the cost of something inside them that is only found once in eons and galaxies and greater things. 

“There are other psionics.” Is what you say, and you’re not sure why. It seems like lately everything you say is toeing the line between scrupulously considered and completely spontaneous. You are careful, except when you aren’t. You are brash, except for when you examine each word like it’s hiding something more. 

A troll of unreasonable and inexplicable extremes, that’s you. 

“Kar, I’vve flarped with him. Halibut, I’vve fought with him. What he does; that shit ain’t psionics, not anything I’vve seen. It’s like— it’s like he’s the suns or some shit.” 

Red Sun, Blue Sun. Purple sun, green sun. 

Sollux, you think, Inside Sollux, there are two suns. Two Sollux, two suns. 

“Maybe.” You murmur. Eridan is watching you intently, and there’s something fascinated in his eyes that is only adjacent to pity, that has very little to do with quadrants at all. 

He’s waiting for me to talk, you realize. Because he thinks I’m going to say something important. 

The fire it sparks in your veins is different, different from the drowsiness of Karkat, something pitied, or the squirming rage of Karkat, something hated. Karkat, someone important. 

“Eridan, do you ever think about what our suns look like ten galaxies away?” You ask, the question a misty path in your thinkpan. You’re not sure where you’re going, but you’re definitely going. 

“I don’t havve to, I’vve seen pictures. They’re small, like any star that far a away. It’s just science.” He answers. He’s circling one of his rings around his middle finger, around and around and around, like he’s trying to chew through one thought over and over until it’s finally digested. 

“Exactly. The sun, his bullshit overpowered psionics, they’re the most important things in the universe, until they’re not. There’s other suns. There’s other psionics, and if you put a bunch together they can probably do what Sollux can do. It’s cumulative. But that’s all secondary— I mean, Sollux is brilliant, put your hate-feud with him to the side for a moment and tell me honestly that he’s not the most genius troll you’ve ever met by a margin the length of a Flayboy model’s legs.” 

“Wwell, my hate isn’t deservvin of someone stupid.” Eridan says, and that’s him agreeing with you in his own high and roundabout way. 

You continue—“ Genius like that isn’t cumulative—you wait a thousand sweeps and you still won’t get another Sollux. Him being a helmsman—it would be wasting something you can’t measure.” 

You think of all those other helmsman, dead in every measure but bloodpusher, those flesh husks pushing ships further into the darkness, and you think with startling clarity that making them helmsmen is wasting something immeasurable too. It’s not a thought you can explain, not without sounding stupid, and Eridan is looking at you like you’re saying something important and smart—even you don’t hate yourself enough to make it end sooner than it has to. 

“Yeah.” Eridan says, thoughtful. “I guess you’re right.” 

“Yeah.” You mirror your moirail. “I guess I am.”


	15. Chapter Fifteen

The helmsroom is dark, darker than the night back at your hive ( _ not yours, not anymore _ ). For a moment, you think that it is not a room at all, that perhaps you had fallen through the ship into the gelid vacuum of the surrounding  _ nothing.  _ It is not a thought accompanied by fear, strangely enough. Terror and dread run bright and sharp through your veins, but in that weightless moment of darkness you feel nothing at all. 

But this place is more than warm,  _ hot,  _ pressing upon your skin balmy and thick like something you could swim through. You have seen pictures of jungles before, and with the soft bio-luminescence of the ship’s bowel-tendrils slowly fading into focus like a snapshot you feel as though you’re in some strange parody of one, flesh vines curling tight around you like a secret. 

“Hey dipshit.” Sollux greets you.

You turn, and there he is. He still has those stupid glasses, illuminated from below, red and blue stars cutting through space. 

Online, you never understood quite how tall he is. With Eridan, you had more or less figured, but the lean, sharp angles of Sollux are somehow jarring and unnatural, limbs that don’t quite add up quite right. A prime number of a troll, forever confounding the division-oriented establishment. 

Being unnatural is something he wears well. 

Your voice up and fucks off for a moment, to who-knows-where.

Finally, you manage— “Hi.” It’s pathetic, and Sollux doesn’t like you like that. You wince. 

Even without his glasses, Sollux has these blank eyes that don’t tell you anything; he could be angry as a subjugglator and it wouldn’t show. Except, it would, because he’d probably be eye-frying you at that point, but still. 

One of the gut-tendrils of the ship is merged into his back like a leash, but other than that, he looks normal, a far-cry from what you suspect is usual helmsman procedure. 

_ Sol could power this ship with his pinky-claw _ , you think, and the voice sounds like Eridan in your thinkpan even though you’re pretty sure he wouldn’t phrase it exactly like that. It scares you a little, his voice in your thinkpan.

“Eridan treating you well?” Sollux asks, head cocked, and his lisp blurs the ‘you’ into a ‘thou’, making you feel like you’re in the middle of some avant-garde Stakespeare production. 

“I am.” Eridan interjects before you have a chance to answer. He sounds irritated. It’s not like he’s lying, but you figure he’s probably upset Sollux addressed you before him. Knowing Sollux, he probably did that just to piss him off. His gills have puffed a bit so that they’re spread like fans around his face. A hand on his lower arm calms him down as much as can be expected in the presence of the troll who has been his fervent pitch interest for as long as you can remember. 

Your eyes keep darting to your moirail in the periphery of your vision. It’s an unspoken necessity, considering just what you can and can’t say. If you and the psionic want to say much of anything, it’ll have to be indirect, speaking in between the lines Eridan can read. 

_ Neither of us have ever been great with subtlety,  _ you think with a sinking heaviness of dread in your digestion-chamber. 

You cross your arms over your chest, conscious of how small you are between the two of them. 

“Did Eridan take you from ascension too?” You ask. You try to imagine it, but the picture won’t form in your thinkpan. The characters don’t lend themselves to the scene. 

Sollux laughs, and the lisp makes him sound a bit like a pupa, young and stupid. He’s anything but stupid, and it lately it feels as if all of you suddenly have become so old, like you all went to sleep in your coons one day and woke up having unwittingly left themselves behind. 

“No. Fish-stick over there and I planned all this for about a sweep.” Sollux reveals. 

For a moment, you don’t understand a goddamned thing. The whole world has become drenched in white noise, and the same words keep echoing in your thinkpan without registering meaning. 

Then, a few moments later, you still don’t understand a goddamned thing, but you have enough presence of thinkpan to feel sick about it. You’re fighting to keep yourself from throwing up, and you don’t even know why— it’s thoroughly humiliating, but it seems like not much isn’t as of late. 

Eridan is saying something in a soft, concerned voice, crouched before you and rubbing your arms in little spirals. 

Sollux is still standing there, light softly glowing from the sockets in his skull. With Eridan crouched before you, the red and blue light and mustard pallor of his skin form a sort of halo over and between his horns. 

Eridan is talking, yes, but his voice is like a leaf on water, too light to cause a ripple in the heavy, unbearable silence that drenches the room and makes it hard to breathe. 

“How many husktops did you two break during this strange and apparently surreptitious pitch mating process?” You ask, and Eridan grins toothily, relieved. 

It always seemed like a legendary tragedy that Sollux is incapable of really rolling his eyes, seeing as he is the singular most suited troll you have ever met for the action.  _ If he had normal eyes _ , you think,  _ they’d be rolling constantly like a tumbleweed, causing a massively fatal traffic jam as amazed bystanders stop to watch.  _ This mental image, at least, cheers away a bit of that nauseous and unsure sadness in your guts. 

“In the double-digits. Also, we’re not fucking, asshole. This is what I get for saving your ass, apparently; slander by way of insinuating I’d settle romantically for ED.” 

“Not fucking  _ yet. _ ” Eridan snarks, just to rile Sollux up, and their constant strife would be comforting in it’s familiarity if you weren’t so distracted by something the yellowblood had said. 

“What do you mean,” you murmur, interrupting their bickering, “‘saving my ass’?”

Sollux looks at you like you had just tried to eat sopor slime. “I told you, KK, we’d been planning all this for more than a fucking sweep. ED, are you sure you didn’t hit his head on something?” 

“I’m not a fucking invalid, asshole.” You snap, because at least when Eridan acts like you’re stupid he’s nice about it. The words sound distant to your own ears. 

_ We’d been planning this.  _ You hadn’t really considered the logistics of however Eridan did what he did for you, chalking most of it up to money and your own slip-ups about yourself. 

It feels like a betrayal, which is as fucking absurd as most of the reactions your stupid body likes to decide upon.  _ He saved me,  _ you think.  _ They both did.  _

Somehow, it doesn’t feel like anything to be grateful for. 

  
  



	16. Chapter Sixteen

Sollux somehow manages to eventually shoo the two of you away with the sort of casual irritation not fitting of a troll with a ship suckling from his veins.

The silence after the door shuts is something heavy shared by the two of you. Without the banter, it is just this—you, Eridan. The guts of the ship curling like a dying troll.

The worst part of seeing Sollux is the empty spot where other trolls should be. Most of them, you had not liked much—you can’t understand why knowing you will probably never talk to them again makes you so sad.

Maybe it’s the finality of it. Maybe you could have liked them, if you tried harder. Maybe you’re just destined to be miserable no matter what, and in the absence of immediate danger your thinkpan will resort to painting everything else in the ugliest shades of their colors.

Eridan does not hold your hand in that hallway like a morail, or like a highblood, or like a jailor. He holds your hand like a scared kid watching their lusus die. He is holding your hand like you three-sweeps-old whispering to the rustling stalks and sliver-moons and rushing veins ‘ _please don’t go_ ’ and imagining the tickle of dirt between your foot-stubs like an answer.

The only good thing is knowing that he is feeling this oily, ugly feeling too. Misery for two is a close substitute for contentedness.

Eridan silently brings you to the upper ship, and the two of you float through the luxury-shine of it all like ghosts. Eventually you find yourselves reflected in a wall of window, white and silver floors and walls sharply yielding to something distant and just-left of black.

You grab two throw-pillows and lay them on the floor with a nervous, unnecessary exactness. Eridan sits behind and to the right of you, one long leg hooked around your waist and the other drawn up to his chin.

If you squint your eyes just right, your eyes can’t tell where you end and he begins.

You have a way of keeping things and people with you even after they might as well be gone. An accidental scar from Crabdad along your arm, particles of dirt from that small and wind-battered hive still stuck under your claws. Old pesterchum messages from Aradia you couldn’t bring yourself to delete.

There’s a slight indentation along Eridan’s ring-finger, a nearly-imperceptible divot in his skin. You feel it over and over again and think that maybe Eridan’s carrying a few trolls too. Feferi will live in the skin of his long after an imperial trident stills her own.

Everything that ever touches you leaves claw-marks in its wake.

Eridan pulls you closer, chin resting along your shoulder. His fins splay like fingers across your cheek. You imagine that if you sat here long enough, him pressed into your side, your cheeks would change to remember the shape of them. It doesn’t seem outlandish. In the unwavering, inexact light of the open universe pouring dimly through the ship windows, it seems almost inevitable.

It’s not hard to pity him, but it’s the sort of pity that hurts to look in the eye. It’s not hard to pity him, but it’s hard to see yourself in the reflection of his cornea and-.

And.

And what? And you might pity him too? Might hate him? Realize you don’t know him at all?

If you were asked to draw yourself from memory, you’re not sure you could quite remember the shape of it. All the clarity would be in the splash of bright, cherry red.

“It’s alwways so much bigger than in your thinkpan.” Eridan breaks the silence. “You think you’vve got a grasp on it, but then you see it again and you realize that it’s not the sort of thing you can picture. Like, you can see it when you’re looking at it, like this, but you can’t take it wwith you, because your thinkpan isn’t big enough to carry it all.”

You feel him frown along your shoulder. “Does that make sense? I feel like I’m not making any sense.”

“No-, I mean yeah. Yeah, I get it.” You whisper, “...like it’s so big and you’re so fucking small. It’s terrifying.”

Eridan stares into the pinpricked-blackness and lets out a breathy laugh.

“It’s fucking amazing. One day, all of this is gonna be mine, y’noww? I’m gonna rule this intergalactic bitch.”

It’s a startling declaration, beyond the length of his fins. It’s almost traitorous, but who could you tell? Who could pity you but this radical, reaching troll, always looking to break things he can barely reach.

“I’d give you the world. I’d give you it and you wouldn’t even need to ask.” Eridan promises. You watch your reflection in the ship-window and try to find the right words to tell him you don’t want it.

In the path between the thought and the words in your mouth and the convoluted twists and turns and quick-sand-pits it entails, you end up with this— “Do you really want to?”

You’re not sure when it became a question, or when it got turned on its head. Maybe at the roundabout of self-doubt or the lake of blood-bullshit or the ever-present road-signs reminding you not to look directly at yourself or you’ll go blind.

Eridan’s eyes furrow in his reflection. A faint star winks wearily in his left pupil.

“Of course. Wwhy wwouldn’t I?” He sounds lost, and you’re not sure whether he’s confused with himself, or you, or both. It’s a stupid question, because Eridan’s got that high-blood ambition for conquering and he’s got it in spades, has been a military-freak ever since you met him.

It’s a stupid question, but it’s ringing in your ears all the same.

“In the dreams, you wwere happy.” He says finally. “Wwe wwere happy, I think.”

He says it like he’s trying to say ‘ _I’m Sorry_ ’. He’s not apologizing for himself, even if maybe he should.

“How do you know?” You ask. ‘ _How would I know?_ ’ whispers in the spaces between the words.

“It’s not supposed to feel like anything else.” Eridan promises you. “I heard you can’t describe it.”

He’s looking at you in the reflection when he says it; he’s looking at you looking at him.


End file.
